Unlike other material herein, this is an unashamedly partisan post. It's here's to collect together mostly links, for reference.
In December 2014, HP (now HPE) announced the successor to its long line of proprietary enterprise class computer systems: the Integrity Superdome X.
What was particularly interesting about this announcement is that the focus was not just on the Intel Xeon processor, or the scalability of the machine to 16 CPU's and 24 TB of RAM, but what Jeff Kyle, director of product management for mission-critical systems at HP said was most important: "It's all about the software," Kyle told eWEEK.
Superdome X was the first flagship system from HP to not ship with HPUX. Instead its launch OS was Linux. SUSE Linux.
Why? Well SUSE Linux was the launch OS for Superdome X. And yes, that article mentions our old friends from Raleigh, but the fact remains that at launch time, the only benchmarks provided by HP were those with SUSE Linux.
So how about now, 18 months later? Well according to the SPEC website, as of today ALL of the SpecJBB and SpecCPU benchmarks published by HPE for Superdome X use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server:
So there's a clear message here – when HPE is trying to get the best possible performance form their machines, they turn to SUSE Linux.
Why is this? well in terms of raw scalability, SUSE far exceeds RedHat linux:
| Max supported CPUs | Max supported RAM | |
| SLES 12: | 8192 | 1024 TB |
| RHEL 7.2: | 288 | 12 TB |
At the very least, this means that to handle a fully-loaded Superdome X with 24TB of RAM you must use SUSE Linux or risk falling into the "experimental" or at best "unsupported" category. And risk isn't really want you want when running a mission-critical system.
In particular, SUSE Enterprise Linux has actually tested scalability on other systems to 8192 CPU cores and 64TB RAM (no-one could supply a machine with more RAM; the CPU count was qualified after that article was written). SUSE's numbers are therefore not theoretical when it comes to the demands of Superdome X: there is no risk that scaling will not follow the expected path.
This difference is likely to continue as well: both HPE and Intel spend a lot of effort developing code for the Linux to improve scalability, etc, and this is sent “upstream” to the latest kernel versions. This means that you would normally expect the most recent kernel version would have the best performance, due to HPE & Intel contributions. Typically SUSE leads its competitor in implementing the latest kernel features whilst maintaining application and kernel binary compatibility between major kernel releases (e.g. from SLES 11SP1 with 2.6 kernel to SLES 11 SP2 with 3.0 kernel). Given this background it should not be surprising for SUSE to continue to make similar advances in its current SLES 12 major release. Historically Red Hat has not changed major kernel releases: RHEL 5 & 6 were kernel level 2.6, with 3.10 introduced only in 2014 with RHEL 7.
So it's no mistake that HP themselves chose SUSE Enterprise Linux when they migrated their internal systems from HP-UX.
This difference is likely to continue as well: both HPE and Intel spend a lot of effort developing code for the Linux to improve scalability, etc, and this is sent “upstream” to the latest kernel versions. This means that you would normally expect the most recent kernel version would have the best performance, due to HPE & Intel contributions. Typically SUSE leads its competitor in implementing the latest kernel features whilst maintaining application and kernel binary compatibility between major kernel releases (e.g. from SLES 11SP1 with 2.6 kernel to SLES 11 SP2 with 3.0 kernel). Given this background it should not be surprising for SUSE to continue to make similar advances in its current SLES 12 major release. Historically Red Hat has not changed major kernel releases: RHEL 5 & 6 were kernel level 2.6, with 3.10 introduced only in 2014 with RHEL 7.
In other words: as HPE continues to contribute performance & other features to Linux for all of its server platforms, these are most likely to appear (with full global enterprise-class support) on SUSE Enterprise Linux long before they are available on RHEL.
So it's no mistake that HP themselves chose SUSE Enterprise Linux when they migrated their internal systems from HP-UX.
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