In early February 2024, Turnium SD-WAN will support deployments on OpenSUSE Linux, expanding the range of deployment options available to partners and enabling partners to benefit from SUSE’s expansive deployment, management, support, security, and upgrade capabilities.
Turnium is expanding its supported operating systems to include OpenSUSE Linux. A Turnium-OpenSUSE ISO will be available by early February 2024 in addition to the existing Debian ISO. The OpenSUSE ISO for Turnium will be deployable on Aggregators or CPE and a blend of Debian and OpenSUSE nodes (Aggregators and CPE) can be operated simultaneously.
OpenSUSE provides Turnium and its channel partners with business and technical benefits, including:
- OpenSUSE is developed and actively supported by SUSE, an organization with significant enterprise customers and strategic investment in OpenSUSE as part of its corporate strategy,
- OpenSUSE benefits from SUSE’s quality assurance to deliver a reliable, secure, and maintained operating system,
- OpenSUSE benefits from the EAL4+ security certification of SUSE Linux Enterprise,
- The SUSE community offers very solid support,
- SUSE also offers an easy upgrade from OpenSUSE community support to subscription-based Enterprise support. This option can help partners obtain direct support from SUSE with defined service level intervals for critical customer deployments. The upgrade can be executed from within OpenSUSE and delivers software certified to run on hardware from enterprise server vendors including HPE and Dell,
- SUSE employs engineers to support and develop OpenSUSE, ensuring that patches and functionality are delivered quickly.
During the most recent Terrapin SSH vulnerability detected in December 2023, OpenSUSE patches were available the same day as the vulnerability was announced, much faster than other distributions.
Adding OpenSUSE support delivers other key technology benefits:
- Deploying new kernels in OpenSUSE is easy and reliable,
- Using OpenSUSE helps Turnium establish the foundation of a firmware-style upgrade methodology for Aggregators and CPE that would include full-system auto-rollback on upgrade failures,
- This is enabled by the Btrfs filesystem along with SUSE’s Snapper automatic system snapshot utility,
- A firmware-style upgrade, once available, will protect Turnium partners from having to roll trucks by greatly reducing the likelihood of failed CPE or Aggregator upgrades and keeps customer sites and critical infrastructure online in case an upgrade fails,
- The OpenSUSE ISO is approximately 40% smaller than the Debian ISO, making installations faster due to the smaller amount of data written to the disk,
- OpenSUSE is supported to run in AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure public cloud environments, enabling deployments to span public and private cloud infrastructure.
Turnium has been using OpenSUSE Open Build Service (OBS) to create Turnium’s ISO since 2013. OBS is thoroughly tested and maintained by SUSE to ensure quality assurance and security. Turnium has also been using SUSE’s KIWI software for internal testing images since 2015 and to create distribution bonding ISOs since the 6.5 release.
In addition to OpenSUSE, their free Linux distribution, SUSE offers Turnium flexibility for the future and for potential future business cases that includes SUSE Rancher, a container environment, SUSE Enterprise Service, SUSE Enterprise Micro, SUSE Enterprise Real-time, and SUSE support for ARM.
The new Turnium-OpenSUSE ISO will be available in the coming weeks, after partner Management Servers are upgraded. A formal announcement will be sent out to the OEM Partner technical contacts.
Turnium has used Debian as its core operating system since the company was founded as Multapplied Networks in 2011. By adding OpenSUSE support, Turnium expands its footprint in the open-source community and enables more IT experts to deploy, operate, and maintain Turnium SD-WAN. Contact Turnium today for more information.