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Novell has received an SAP Pinnacle Award in the category “Technology: Co-Innovation for Core Business,” recognizing Novell as an SAP partner who has made significant contributions to SAP's customer-focused ecosystem. Novell was honored specifically for work with SAP on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Priority Support for SAP as well as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server high availability and virtualization for SAP. SAP Pinnacle Awards are awarded by SAP to leading partners who have excelled in enhancing the customer experience by teaming with SAP to help customers address critical issues such as accelerating innovation and improving return on investment. Winners were selected based on nominations received from partners and SAP employees. This year, 29 award recipients were chosen from a group of 197 nominees.

“This award is a reflection of the synergies created when two industry leaders work together on behalf of customers. Novell and SAP share a commitment to providing extreme value to customers, and our collaboration now extends along the stack from the operating system to the application, with comprehensive technical support to help make sure all parts of customers' IT environments work as one.” (Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and chief technology officer, Novell.)

Novell has announced the SUSE Appliance program and the beta availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise JeOS (Just enough Operating System).

The SUSE Appliance Program will enable independent software vendors (ISVs) to create appliances combining their applications with the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform one integrated package for end customer deployment. These bundles of applications will help ISVs simplify application support while dramatically reducing developmental costs and easing deployment of applications by end customers.

The beta availability of JeOS is part of the SUSE Appliance Program, the first minimized version of the SUSE Linux Enterprise OS that ISVs can use to build appliances.

Novell has joined Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program. As a result of Novell's participation in this program, customers will be able to confidently run Windows Server 2008 as a virtualized guest on top of the Xen hypervisor in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 and receive cooperative support from either company. Novell is currently running the tests required by the validation process in the Server Virtualization Validation Program, and expects the tests to be completed by August 2008.

Microsoft today formally announced the Server Virtualization Validation Program, a new program to enable vendors to validate the combination of Windows Server 2008 as a virtual machine guest running on third party server virtualization solutions. Under the program, vendors will self-test and validate certain technical requirements of their server virtualization software running Windows Server 2008 as a guest operating system.
Through the existing Novell-Microsoft technical collaboration agreement, Novell was an early participant to the Server Virtualization Validation Program and helped Microsoft fine tune many of the parameters of the Server Virtualization Validation Program. This work included helping to define and validate the technical tests and using the joint Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Lab in Cambridge, Mass., as a test-bed resource.

As part of its extensive interoperability agreement with Microsoft, Novell holds a unique position as SUSE Linux Enterprise is currently the only Xen hypervisor on which Microsoft will provide full support today for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 running as a virtual guest. Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program is designed to provide customers with additional peace of mind.

“We continue to hear from customers that they want to run Windows Server 2008 as a virtualized guest on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise,” said Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of product management for Linux and Open Platform Solutions at Novell. “Novell is excited to extend the on-going technical collaboration efforts between Novell and Microsoft to the Server Virtualization Validation Program, which will give customers the performance, security and reliability that comes with running Windows Server 2008 as a virtual guest on SUSE Linux Enterprise.”

The Server Virtualization Validation Program defines a set of technical tests that third party virtualization solutions must pass to become validated by Microsoft. The program also enables vendors to validate various configurations so that mutual customers deploying Windows Server on those configurations can receive cooperative technical support in virtualized environments. Customers with validated solutions will benefit from the support provided by Microsoft as a part of the regular Windows Server technical support framework.

“Novell played an important role in helping us architect and fine-tune this program,” said Zane Adam, senior director of virtualization strategy, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft Corp. “This is just one more illustration of how Novell and Microsoft are working together to develop interoperable virtualization solutions.”

Supercomputers around the world are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. According to TOP500, a project that tracks and detects trends in high-performance computing, SUSE Linux Enterprise is the Linux of choice on the world's largest HPC supercomputers today. Of the top 50 supercomputers worldwide, 40 percent are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise, including the top three – IBM eServer Blue Gene at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IBM eServer BlueGene/P (JUGENE) at the Juelich Research Center and SGI Altix 8200 at the New Mexico Computing Applications Center.

Leveraging the economics of open source software and low cost hardware, Novell, together with its partners, is bringing the same high performance computing capabilities utilized in supercomputers to enterprises and mid-market customers in a range of industries, including manufacturing, research and academic organizations.
Customers such as Audi, MTU Aero Engines, NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division, Porsche Informatik, Seoul National University, Tokyo Institute of Technology and Wehmeyer are running supercomputers and computer clusters on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to handle mission-critical workloads with minimal downtime.

Three supercomputers at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division currently operate on SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell. These computers are used to evaluate next-generation technology to meet NASA's engineering and science requirements, control system operation and launch programs, and support NASA's aeronautics, science and space operations initiatives. NASA's next supercomputer, scheduled for completion this summer, will also run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and when deployed will be one of the largest SGI Altix ICE systems, on par with the current third-ranked most powerful supercomputer.

“At NASA we are working to solve some of science's most complex challenges, so an operating system that can help us achieve the highest level of computational functionality is very important,” said William Thigpen, engineering branch chief in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division. “In selecting an operating system, performance and flexibility are two of our top considerations. The right operating system helps us to push the boundaries of computing performance and bring new levels of innovation to our space, science and aeronautics programs.”

Partners Leverage SUSE Linux Enterprise
Companies like Appro International, Atipa Technologies, Cluster Resources, HP, Penguin Computing, SGI and Teradata are incorporating SUSE Linux Enterprise Server into the high-performance computing solutions they are providing to their own customers.

“We recently introduced a new family of platforms from entry-level to active-enterprise data warehouses that addresses many customer needs,” said Scott Gnau, chief development officer, Teradata Corporation. “Our solutions are designed to drive powerful business intelligence and real-time decisioning applications, including fraud detection and prevention, customer segmentation, human resources and forecasting. Our solutions run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, which, thanks to its extreme scalability, reliability, flexibility and ease of use, is the optimal Linux operating system for our customers' businesses. We selected Novell and its SUSE Linux Enterprise platform because of its full range of industry-leading Linux services to support large-scale, mission-critical enterprises.”

Irene Qualters, SGI senior vice president of software, said, “At SGI, our focus is on high-performance computing and robust scalability, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the operating system of choice for many of our Altix and Altix XE customers. As the requirements for high-performance computing continue to grow more complex across industries, the collaboration between SGI and Novell ensures that SUSE Linux Enterprise will continue to be the leading operating system for high-performance clusters that meet those new business needs today.”

Michael A. Jackson, president of Cluster Resources Inc., said, “Our partnership with Novell is helping to overcome the complexity and supportability limitations of the HPC market. The resulting Moab Cluster Builder for SUSE Linux Enterprise installs a turnkey, HPC-optimized version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with easy-to-use resource and workload management. In addition, with Novell's interoperability alliance with Microsoft, we can enable a dynamic hybrid OS cluster. This next-generation solution causes a single cluster to be a mix of both SUSE Linux Enterprise and Windows and to dynamically change the OS mix based on the workload submitted. Novell is truly a centerpiece of both next-generation HPC and making it easy to use, commercially reliable and supportable.”

SUSE Linux Enterprise has been a leader in the high performance computing market for more than a decade, based on the strong engineering heritage of the distribution.
“SUSE Linux Enterprise has become the HPC operating system of choice, thanks to its scalability and performance capabilities and the wide variety of open source software and development tools available,” said Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of product management for Open Platform Solutions at Novell. “By leveraging industry-standard servers and clusters running SUSE Linux Enterprise, customers and partners can build and deploy the world's best HPC-class products and applications.”

The Novell Certified Linux Administrator (CLA) is a new certification and provides the day-to-day administration of installed SUSE Linux Enterprise Server networks.