Novell News

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.

Today Tech Data, one of the largest global distributors of technology products announced Open Tech, a new channel for open source independent software vendors (ISVs) to market and sell their solutions to thousands of resellers nationwide.

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.

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 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.

At VMworld this week, HP announced innovative management and service solutions that extend the benefits of virtualization beyond servers to the entire infrastructure. The announcement included the HP Solution Builder program, which is being supported by Novell.

Holger Dyroff, vice president of business development, Open Platform Solutions, “HP and VMware are critical virtualization partners for Novell, and we are excited by our ongoing collaboration to jointly develop solutions that enable customers to maximize the value of their virtualization investments. We offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as part of the HP Solution Builder program to provide users with the benefits of our operating system’s full optimization for VMware ESX on HP BladeSystems — a combination with all the necessary components to deliver a cost-effective, high performance virtualization environment for enterprise data centers.”

With SUSE Studio, a free Web-based tool from Novell, building a custom Linux distribution is quick and easy. Watch InformationWeek’s Serdar Yegulalp demonstrate how to create one using a beta copy of the product. See the video here.