Novell News

In this latest Network World podcast, Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager at Novell, speaks with Brian Proffitt, community manager for the Linux Foundation. They talk about the first annual LinuxCon event that happened in Portland, Oregon in September and Brian hints at plans for the next LinuxCon.

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)

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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The IT infrastructure is a mass of incompatible systems with unique risk controls and policies, making compliance and risk management complex, time-consuming and costly. To address this, we recently expand our global partnership with SAP to help customers deliver confident business and IT governance, risk and compliance programs. The joint solution delivers:

• 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

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.

In this recently posted NetworkWorld podcast Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier speaks with openSUSE booster and GNOME board member Vincent Untz, about the upcoming enhancements to openSUSE 11.2 as well as some of the cool work that the GNOME team is doing to improve functionality and increase usability. Also, get highlights from the Boston Summit 2009, the three-day GNOME developer hackfest, and find out how to get involved in improving GNOME regardless of your level of technical expertise. (12:40)

The openSUSE Project is getting ready to release openSUSE 11.2 in just under a week. When the release is final, the project will create promotional DVDs and CDs to give away at Linux and open source events. But what cover should be on them? The openSUSE contributor community has come up with three really fantastic designs to grace the openSUSE media sleeves, but which one should they choose?

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier has blogged about the choices and is soliciting comments and votes for the community favorite. Polling will end on Monday, so help the community choose today!

And don’t forget the openSUSE launch on Thursday, November 12. The openSUSE 11.2 release will come with brand-new GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice, Firefox, and all your favorite open source server and desktop apps.

Your vote counts, so don’t delay, let us know which cover you like best today.

In the recent Gartner Report, “Magic Quadrant for User Provisioning,” Novell is recognized for its focus on partnerships.

“Novell’s network of smaller, regional-based integration and consulting continues to grow through established integration providers such as Atos Origin, Deloitte and Wipro, as well as global alliance partners such as HP and SAP.”

Mixed IT environments are a reality for all organizations, which means our customers depend on our ecosystem of partners to reduce cost, complexity and risk.  A great example of our partnership in action is highlighted in this SAP Insider article:

Let’s say an employee is changing roles from an accounting clerk to an accounting manager. For her new role, the accounting manager must have access to a new set of resources. For this, her organization needs to provide and track access, and instantly identify and provide alerts about any policy violations, such as gaining access to both the accounts payable and receivable systems. Properly setting up the accounting manager requires a strategic layering of technology, such as SAP BusinessObjects Access Control and the Novell Compliance Management Platform extension for SAP environments. This pairing helps companies ensure that business policies will be consistently enforced and monitored across SAP and non-SAP applications throughout the organization.

As John Dragoon appropriately says in this post, “Making IT work as one is who we are, what we do and it embodies the core values that we provide to our customers.”

Today at the Enterprise 2.0 show in San Francisco, Novell announced the industry’s first real-time collaboration platform for the enterprise. Called Novell Pulse, it unites communication, authoring and social messaging tools so widely dispersed teams of people can easily share and edit documents, jointly browse websites, and have a rich digital conversation, all in real-time. Novell Pulse helps drive enterprise productivity and innovation by making it easier to communicate digitally, generate ideas and share information.

In additional, we also announced that Novell and Google are working together to enable Novell Pulse users and Google Wave users to seamlessly work together across both systems. Novell is the first collaboration provider to integrate with Google Wave.

The design point for Novell Pulse is the enterprise user, so we’ve placed a strong emphasis on features such as security and management controls. We’ve also drawn on our 20+ years experience in the enterprise collaboration space with products like GroupWise, and worked to address enterprise and business use cases.

Novell Pulse is a key component in Novell’s collaboration strategy and open collaboration architecture. A beta of Novell Pulse will be available early next year, with generally availability planned for mid -2010 in a cloud deployment and an on-premise version to follow later. In the meantime, check out some of the early press coverage in here, here and here.

To learn more about Novell Pulse check out our website, view the demo or register at the Enterprise 2.0 conference site to see the archived keynote address from Novell and Google.