Novell News

Welcome to the second installment of the Ingres podcast in which Liz Padula, senior marketing manager at Novell, speaks with Deb Woods, vice president of Product Management at Ingres Corporation, about some of the benefits Ingres has experienced with the SUSE Appliance Program.

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.

 

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by Meike Chabowski, product marketing manager, SUSE Linux Enterprise

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.

Today we are introducing the first in a series of podcasts featuring the SUSE Appliance Program and our ISV partners. In this debut podcast, Liz Padula, senior marketing manager at Novell, talks with Deb Woods, vice president of Product Management at Ingres Corporation. As a leading participant in the SUSE Appliance Program, Ingres is fostering the growth of this new form of application delivery – the software appliance.

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.

 

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Today, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) released a white paper that is a must read for anyone interested in the next steps for cloud interoperability. The white paper, “Interoperable Clouds – A White Paper from the Open Cloud Standards Incubator,” outlines usage scenarios for cloud interoperability, the cloud service lifecycle and a cloud reference architecture.

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 week Novell launched Mono Tools for Visual Studio, a revolutionary add-in module for Microsoft Visual Studio. Mono Tools lets .NET developers build Linux, UNIX and Mac OS X applications without leaving their familiar Visual Studio environment. By allowing .NET-trained developers to leverage their existing expertise and ecosystem of .NET code, libraries and tools, Mono Tools slashes the time and costs of developing multi-platform applications. But don’t just take our word for it – check out Mono Tools for yourself. Download a free 30-day trial here. Try it and let us know what you think.

by Dustin McNabb, Product Marketing Manager, Business Service Management

This year’s itSMF USA Fusion conference in Dallas offered a variety of sessions targeted toward both new and experienced IT service management professionals. Whether you’re working hard on rolling out an existing ITIL project, or wanting to learn about the latest goings on related to ITIL v3, it was all at the event. The buzz at the show was “lean IT” — the latest process maturity model to influence IT organizations. This model — developed out of the manufacturing sector — extends lean manufacturing concepts to focus on the elimination of waste, where waste is work that adds no value to a product or service. Certainly an interesting and hot topic at itSMF…we’ll see how it’s adopted by companies as another year unfolds.

For Novell, the conference gave us a terrific opportunity to highlight the  service-driven data center capabilities of Novell BSM 4.6 which includes a new PlateSpin Recon adapter. Through this and other adapters into IBM Tivoli T/EC, IBM Micromuse Netcool, BMC Remedy, and VMWare’s V-Sphere, we’re able to deliver a complete real-time business service management dashboard for the virtualized data center.

by Matt Richards, Senior Program Manager, SUSE Appliance Program

You might have seen the articles (internetnews, InformationWeek, cnet) reporting that Linux creator Linus Torvalds said the Linux kernel is “bloated”. We think Linus is right.

There are good reasons why Linux has put on the pounds over the years. Linux got big because of it’s tremendous success as a general-purpose operating system that needs to support more and more use cases. Linux is now pervasive – think IBM System Z, x86, cell phones, and my Tivo – but, with that ubiquity comes size. More packages, more drivers, bigger size. And its ease of use also comes with added size. My whole family uses Linux now because it is easy to use, provides a great user experience, and is more cost effective than other options. Yet despite all the bloat, it is still more efficient than any other operating system. If you don’t believe me, just replace Windows with Linux on the same hardware to notice the performance improvement.

The good news is that unlike most other operating systems, it’s very easy to put Linux on a diet. Linux is highly modular, so it’s relatively easy to remove packages, add packages, make changes – essentially do whatever you want. Keep the critical parts, remove the bloat. One of Linux’s great strengths is the ability to customize the OS to address a very specific use case.

You can make these changes using tools that make it fast and easy to create your own fully supported, mass customized Linux. See SUSE Studio for a great example of this capability.

At Novell we think this is the future of Linux. We expect to see more and more customization of the OS for specific platforms, applications, or use cases. SUSE Studio gives users the ability to create their own software appliances in a matter of minutes, test them, then deploy. This level of flexibility will further drive Linux adoption across the board, from cell phones to data centers, to the cloud. And it’s a great diet plan.

This week Novell released MonoTouch, the industry’s first solution for building iPhone and iPod applications using .NET and C#. MonoTouch is important because it allows developers, for the first time, to use higher level programming languages like C# and the .NET framework to write enterprise applications for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. By enabling a whole new segment of developers to more productively develop applications for these mobile devices, MonoTouch is expanding the availability of iPhone and iPod applications.

MonoTouch has been well received by the press (see InfoWorld, InternetNews, Ars Technica, eWeek). You can try MonoTouch now by downloading an evaluation version here.

Last week Microsoft launched the CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit foundation created with the goal of bringing the open source and software development communities closer together to increase participation on open source projects. Novell Vice President of Developer Platforms and Mono Project founder Miguel de Icaza is an interim board member of the new foundation (see Miguel’s comments here).

Novell is pleased to have Miguel serve on the board of CodePlex. We believe this foundation is a move in the right direction from Microsoft as encouraging contributions is good for the open source community. We applaud Microsoft for showing a willingness to engage with the open source community, something we have encouraged as a supporter of open source technology and Microsoft partner through our interoperability agreement.