Novell Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman recently sat down with Scott Swigart to talk about how the Linux project has accommodated the accelerating rate of change for the kernel, and offer some insight on where Linux is headed. With 11,000 lines added, 5,500 lines removed, and 2,200 lines modified every single day, Linux is clearly growing faster and stronger.

You can read the full conversation at the How Software Is Built blog here.

You'll also get a status update on Linux.com and how the first six months under "new management" have gone, as well as Brain's plans to increase content and contributions for the benefit of all Linux users. Listen in to find out how you can participate. (13:21)

Ingres is leveraging the SUSE Appliance Program for its open source database management system, which is used by more than 10,000 customers worldwide. The SUSE Appliance Program enables independent software vendors to rapidly build, update, configure and go to market with fully-supported software and virtual appliances built with SUSE Studio and based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The Ingres Database also enhances appliance development by giving system integrators access to enterprise-ready features not typically available in open source databases.

In June and November of each year the Top500 list of supercomputers is released. Each year, based on the list, the key operating system for supercomputing is Linux. Linux is cheaper to run and its excellent scalability features, along with its robust security and performance, make it an ideal choice for high performance computing (HPC) systems.

The recently released November Top500 list once again demonstrates that Linux dominates HPC – nearly 90 percent of the Top500 systems run on Linux. Three hundred and ninety-one of these systems are running an unspecified version of Linux. Sixty-two of the supercomputers are proven to run some version (including such variants as UNICOS/lc and CNL) of SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell. Red Hat and its derivatives, including CentOS, comes in a distant second with 16 supercomputers.

The world's fastest supercomputer, the Jaguar XT5, built by Seattle-based Cray Inc., runs on a version of SUSE Linux Enterprise. Jaguar, which is located at the Department of Energy's Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is used by the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) for simulation and computations for environmental, chemical and material science, nuclear energy, astrophysics and particle physics. Jaguar literally has "blown away" its competitors by bringing the theoretical peak of performance speed to 2.3 petaflops: one petaflop/s refers to quadrillion calculations per second — second place Roadrunner from IBM in comparison just reaches 1.3 Petaflops. All the Jaguar computer nodes somewhere run a version of  SUSE Linux Enterprise Server — lightly-customized SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on the service nodes, and Compute Node Linux (CNL) which is Cray's version of the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system with a tuned Linux kernel.

Why is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server the operating system of choice on most of the world's top HPC supercomputers in use today? Since 1993, SUSE engineers have made significant contributions to the advancement and tuning of the Linux kernel and key kernel-related performance technologies. Moreover, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was the first Linux OS in the market to support 64-bit chip sets and is synonymous with high-performance Linux running on 64-bit and mainframe systems. Because of its continuous early support of newer chip sets, including 64-bit, this drove and still drives the success of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on HPC technologies.

The HPC market is maturing from high performance to high productivity. While the world's fastest supercomputer Jaguar is devoted to solving scientific questions, there have been significant changes in the high performance computing landscape during the last few years. Many businesses today are adopting HPC for financial analysis, portfolio management, digital security, surveillance, data warehousing, line-of-business applications and transaction processing. And while HPC has been primarily limited to large enterprises, R&D firms, and academic institutions in the past, that is changing. Mid-market companies are also adopting HPC, due to the availability of affordable and open solutions, which supplant the costly proprietary solutions of the past.

When you begin your day, look in the mirror and ask yourself,"what am I going to do today that will positively change other people's perception of Novell?"  There are so many things that we can share.  We don't have to be pedantic, we don't have to be defensive, but we do have to be positive and open.  When you look at Novell as an infrastructure software company there is an incredible compendium of solutions available that are capable of adding great value to reduce costs, to manage complexity and to mitigate risk.  Yes there are competitors out there, good competitors and those that don't walk their talk.  We can each make assessments of the opportunity, challenge or problem and respond with a Novell solution that creates value but doesn't require a forklift upgrade.  This is I believe a unique differentiator but it requires all of us to step up, be professional and be positive.

The second challenge I extended to that team, because it is critical and because I already know that they will succeed in this is to ask ourselves this question as we get caught in the daily grind.  Ask yourself, "is what I am doing making a difference to our customers and partners."  You may find that this is true more than you may have initially thought.  But, if you find it isn't, consider the prioritization of that activity in the context.

One area that everyone can make a difference in right now is in our online communities.  We're very fortunate that participants tell us what they think.  At the prompting of one of the people I have enormous respect for and with the assistance of our communities leader, I found that folks were taking time to provide thoughts, sometimes negative, and those comments were not being responded to.  As Novell people, we all can make a community difference by investing time each week to review and participate in the communities and to respond, to educate and to help where you can.  It's not just to Product Management to handle, we all have experience, we have expertise, we have perspective so I am asking you again in this context, what can I do today to positively enhance the perception of Novell.  Don't wait for someone else to do this, we all must do it.  Hit it hard and hit it often.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

Ingres is a leading open source database management company with more than 10,000 customers worldwide. Ingres is leveraging the SUSE Appliance Program to provide technology, support and go-to-market resources for systems integrators looking to build fully-supported and easy-to-manage software solutions. Through the use of the SUSE Appliance Program in conjunction with the Ingres database, systems integrators can radically improve total cost of ownership for their customers and reduce appliance setup and build times by 75-80 percent.

Listen to the podcast and check back soon for the second installment of the Ingres podcast, when Liz Padula and Deb Woods will discuss SUSE Studio – the new arrow in the quiver to target opportunities with software appliances.

• Performance – by improving predictability and automating and enforcing common controls while providing transparency to business processes across the organization
• Assurance – by lowering overall risk and increasing external and internal compliance
• Simplification – by eliminating resource silos and inefficiencies and by automating the process of discovering and remediating high-risk business problems

Companies also need experienced and proven guidance to help them integrate their siloed security and compliance efforts. Since 2008, Novell and Atos Origin have partnered to deliver this knowledge and experience helping customers meet stringent security, governance and compliance requirements.

“Today's complex information security environment, combined with the pressure on budgets, requires an end-to-end approach that provides efficient solutions aligned with the business risk challenges,” says Paul Bray, senior vice president and head of global SAP for Atos Origin. “SAP's Business Objects Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) and Novell's Compliance Management Platform extension for SAP environments solutions combined with Atos Origin's experience in integrating large security projects in complex IT environments enable customers to improve business predictability and performance, manage risk and reduce compliance costs.”

Visit the Novell booth (#140) to see this powerful solution in action at SAP Governance Risk & Compliance 2009.  You can also attend the session, Best Practices for Integrated IT governance Using Novell Compliance Management Platform Extension for SAP Environments, to learn more.

• Date: Wednesday, November 18
• Time: 10:15-12:00
• Location: Prague Congress Centre, Prague, Czech Republic

Novell is a board member of the DMTF, an organization focused on bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on system management standards. As part of its work with DMTF, Novell participates on the DMTF Open Cloud Standards Incubator, and contributed to the development of the white paper.

This paper is timely because as cloud computing continues to evolve, standard interfaces will play a pivotal role in promoting interoperability between cloud service providers and cloud service consumers.

Novell is committed to delivering solutions to enable our customer to move their existing infrastructure to a shared cloud environment, and ensure their private and public cloud environments work well together. Our PlateSpin virtualization and workload management products help to identify and evaluate workloads and migrate them to the cloud. Our business service management products help to maximize service levels and optimize workload efficiency. Our Cloud Security Service serves as an entry point for cloud control, extending existing enterprise authentication credentials to the cloud and allowing workloads to be deployed to the cloud in a secure and auditable manner.

This is a great step for Tech Data to recognize the cost reduction and performance optimization benefits of open source solutions.  SUSE Linux Enterprise is a robust platform that, combined with Novell’s entire product portfolio, empowers companies to build, manage, secure and measure mission-critical applications with a low cost of ownership.  A recent market survey, conducted by IDC and Novell, revealed that more than 72 percent of respondents are either actively evaluating or have already decided to increase their adoption of Linux on the server in 2009, with more than 68 percent making the same claim for the desktop.

Additionally, independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are demonstrating tremendous support for the SUSE® Appliance Program from Novell, the industry's first, complete, end-to-end appliance solution that enables ISVs to rapidly build, update, configure and go to market with fully supported software and virtual appliances.

We’re pleased to support Tech Data Open Tech with dedicated Novell PartnerNet training programs and our world-class solutions. Our participation will help our developers and reseller partners become more profitable.

In that time I spent many hours with our customers, partners and sales professionals on calls and I kept hearing this comment that frankly really disappointed me.

We aren't moving to OES 2 from NetWare because it's a) too hard or b) so hard we really think we should look at alternatives.

What?

Let's step back a minute.  When I hear the term NetWare, I always think of NetWare 1.X my first exposure and the amazing for its time NetWare 2.05 that helped me make this industry into a career.  When NetWare 3 came out I started to think differently about NetWare and by the time NetWare 4 was released my perspective had changed completely.  By this time I saw NetWare as a set of services that created value for end users and for corporate IT.  The underlying OS while interesting was not the most important part and the reality even then was that the services were where the real value was.  Organizations used NetWare not because of that screaming fast 32 bit engine but because of the services, like file, print, Novell Directory Services and all the other value in the box.

A lot of time has passed since then, with NetWare evolving the set of services through the remainder of its life.  But like happens everywhere, an evolutionary spurt had to take place.  We wanted 64 bit CPU support.  We wanted the ability to run lots of commercial and open source applications.  We wanted more scale.  We wanted the file systems, the print services, the directory, the network tools like DNS and DHCP.  We didn't want to be tied to closed kernel.  Open Enterprise Server has delivered on those requirements and in the current release delivers a much richer experience than has ever happened.  Today we can do the things we could not do on the old NetWare stack.  We have client independence.  We have massively scalable 64 bit computing.  We have the ability to run virtualization without spending one thin dime on additional software.  We have the ability for every OES Linux server to run applications, over 3,000 are certified.  We have a rich development framework from the open source community.  Stop and think about that.  Is there any other server environment that has demonstrated this level of evolutionary enhancement in so short a time?  No.

And with the release of SP2 we raise the bar even higher by delivering file system audit controls for NSS on Linux, by gaining support from Citrix for the incredible Domain Services for Windows, a new FTP gateway and other enhancements.

Our customers have mixed environments.  Open Enterprise Server 2 is designed to function in mixed environments and does so more effectively than any other alternative out there.  As we enter our 2010 fiscal year I offer the following challenge.  When a customer or partner suggests a decommit or a concern about OES 2, don't say ok I understand.  Ask why.  Ask for an appointment to have a conversation on the subject.  Invite Juan Carlos Cerrutti (there I did it, I volunteered him with asking) or myself.  We will help you.  We may not win every case, but we will win.

Be confident, be strong, be Novell.  Novell team members should leverage the Employee Enablement page (built with Novell Teaming) at https://teaming.innerweb.novell.com/ssf/a/do?p_name=ss_forum&p_action=1&action=view_ws_listing&binderId=68144 for consolidated materials.

Until next time, peace.

Ross