Intel Corp.’s decades-long dominion over the data center isn’t about to end anytime soon, but the first cracks are starting to show. SUSE LLC, one of the top commercial distributors of Linux in the enterprise, has begun offering partners a special version of its platform specifically designed to run on ARM chips.

The move, like so many of its other announcements lately, comes as a response to long-time rival Red Hat Inc, which launched a program to court manufacturers dealing in processors based on designs from the British semiconductor powerhouse all the way back last year. Both vendors hope to seize the rise of software-defined environments made up of small, low-cost servers that benefit from the power efficiency of ARM chips.

But although the underlying motivation may be the same, SUSE’s entry into the 64-bit world doesn’t fully mirror its competitor’s. Work on adding support for the architecture started several years ago in the upstream OpenSUSE community, where new features and other manner of changes are tested before being implemented in the commercial operating system that is ultimately sold to the enterprises.

Yet the release of the ARM-compatible version of SUSE Linux still comes significantly behind the launch of Red Hat’s partner program, which has attracted more than 35 chip makers, server manufacturers and other key suppliers since its launch. That’s not particularly encouraging for SUSE’s efforts to gain an early hold in the emerging ARM market, but nonetheless marks a major victory in the British chip maker’s parallel quest to remove Intel from its data center throne.

Photo via ARM