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.

Recently, we announced the nation’s fourth-largest optical retailer, National Vision, was standardizing its retail locations on SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service to centrally manage 5,000 devices spread across its stores. Today we’re announcing the availability of the latest version of the only enterprise-class Linux operating system tailored specifically for the retail industry, SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service 11.

With SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service 11, retailers can leverage the power of Linux and open source with a reliable, flexible and open platform for point of service/point of sale terminals, kiosks, self-service systems and reverse-vending systems. SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service helps retailers accelerate customer checkout, improve the customer experience, work more efficiently with partners, and enhance overall store operations.

Key benefits of SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service 11 include:
- Reduced ownership costs with no operating system licensing fees. Retailers pay only for maintenance subscriptions and services. They also receive upgrade protection while their subscription is active so they can move to the latest version at any time.
- Lower operational costs. Retailers can re-purpose old machines for point of sale servers and extend the life of legacy systems.
- Common code with all other products in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Platform. IT staff can work across the entire infrastructure from point of sale terminals to servers and mainframe, consolidating skills and avoiding additional costs for training.
- Freedom from vendor lock-in. SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service supports the open standards pervasive in retail environments today. Retailers can access the underlying source code, making it easier to customize their POS systems. Additionally, retailers can use SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service on any hardware system while their subscription is active as it is not tied to a specific device.
- A strong ecosystem of hardware, application, consulting, training and support vendors. Technology leaders, such as IBM, NCR, SAP and Oracle, support SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service, ensuring world-class retail environments. By integrating Novell partner solutions, retailers can deploy additional store applications such as inventory management, cash management, workforce management and loss prevention.

For more information on SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service 11, go here.

Novell has released a new version of its Subscription Management Tool for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. The Tool helps enterprises manage their SUSE Linux Enterprise updates while conforming with corporate firewall policy and regulatory compliance requirements. Integrated and synchronized with Novell Customer Center, the Subscription Management Tool is always updated, acts as a repository for all subscription information and delivers the benefits of centralized management.

Unlike comparable tools from other OS vendors, the fully supported Subscription Management Tool is included free with every SUSE Linux Enterprise subscription. Besides its well-known capabilities like inside-the-firewall security, reduced bandwidth use while updating systems and automated and accurate systems entitlement tracking, the Subscription Management Tool for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 features patch staging, central deployment of packages and support of “sneakernet” configurations. Also, it can now be hosted on a  System z server and is integrated with the new supportability infrastructure of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.

For more information and to download the Tool, go here.

A recent report from IDC forecasts that spending on IT cloud computing services will triple in the next 5 years, reaching a staggering $42 billion by 2012. They also predict that the current economic turmoil won’t hinder this growth because a major benefit of cloud computing is increased IT efficiency and lowered costs.

Novell is actively making cloud computing a reality. This week, IBM announced an extended agreement with Amazon to deliver a wide variety of solutions on a “pay-as-you-go” model, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The solutions will be provided through the Amazon Elastic Cloud, giving businesses new ways to quickly build, deploy and take advantage of the tremendous flexibility that cloud computing environments can bring.

- from Kerry Kim, Product Marketing Manager for SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time at Novell

In the past couple of months, the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC), an independent provider of performance measurement services for the financial services industry, released no less than four separate reports involving Linux real time operating systems from Novell and Red Hat. These reports are important because they provide financial institutions with a benchmark for latency and throughput–measurements that impact the speed and amount of information trading firms can use in executing transactions.

The reports can be confusing though, as they claim each vendor offers the “highest throughput”, or the “lowest latency”, or both. How can this be? How can both operating systems come out on top?

In this case, the devil is in the details and the timing. The results in each report are valid, at least as of the date they were published. And if you read the reports, and check the dates closely, you’ll see that SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time delivers the best possible combination of high throughput and low latency for market data systems based on Reuters Market Data System (RMDS).

But don’t take my word for it. Read the most recent reports and let me know what you think.

Linux Magazine has peered into its crystal ball and picked Novell as one of its “Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2009”. The companies on the list were described as vendors who will be compelling in the year to come and have a high probability of helping their customers save some funds in 2009.

Linux Magazine notes our SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Subscription with Expanded Support program as well as our groundbreaking partnership with Microsoft and the development work being undertaken as part of that partnership.

The Top 20 list is available here (registration required). See the Novell writeup on slide 6.

The Linux Foundation has launched the “I’m Linux” video contest, where participants create a video to showcase what Linux means to users and to inspire new users. In true community-style anyone can participate and everyone is invited to vote on the videos. For more contest details and rules, go here.

As a board member of the Linux Foundation, Novell thinks this is a great opportunity for the Linux community to unleash their inner directors on behalf of Linux. For inspiration, check out these Novell Linux videos, here, here and here.

On November 13 we closed our acquisition of Managed Objects, a leader in the business service management market. The acquisition extends Novell’s strategy of making IT work as one in the data center by adding tools to provide a unified view of all information and workloads. IT and business managers get much needed visibility into how their information systems deliver business services across physical and virtual environments. Managers can then make informed decisions to ensure availability and quality-of-service while improving agility and lowering the total cost of data center management.

The Managed Objects products are very complementary to our existing management and virtualization capabilities. By adding the Managed Objects toolset to the Novell portfolio of data center solutions, we are unique in providing technology-agnostic and proven cross-platform solutions that span both the physical and virtual worlds – all in one unified view. Expect to hear more about our M.O. for Managed Objects soon

In order to reap the benefits of virtualization, companies are investing in additional networking equipment, including network expansion cards, switches and cables. To help companies reduce costs, increase bandwidth and improve performance of virtual server environments, HP recently announced breakthrough networking, storage and server technologies. The HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet module, a direct connect storage bundle for HP BladeSystem, and the HP ProLiant DL385 G5p server are among HP’s offerings that are helping customers efficiently deploy their virtualized infrastructures. For more information about these new HP technologies, go here.

According to Holger Dryoff, Novell vice president of Product Management for SUSE Linux Enterprise, “Novell will support HP’s new Virtual Connect Flex-10 modules on current and future versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The combination of HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell running on HP’s BL495c blades delivers a powerful, fully supported ‘wire-once’ environment, with enhanced performance, scalability and quality of service. Customers get simplified management and administration of virtual machines and LAN and SAN connections, saving them time and money.”

To learn more about how Novell and HP are working together on innovative technology solutions for their customers, go here.

- from Kerry Kim, Product Marketing Manager for SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time at Novell

Sometimes I get asked to explain the difference between a real time operating system, like SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time, and a general purpose operating system, like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Most people can understand at a higher level that a real time operating system is recommended when predictability of service is important – and that a general purpose operating system can be used for everything else. But when I then start talking about the PREEMPT_RT patch set, and prioritized threads vs. fair scheduling, inevitably I’ll start to see some eyes glaze over.

Sometimes, a picture truly is worth a thousand words. Open source messaging middleware provider ØMQ recently compared the performance of their platform on a real time Linux kernel and standard Linux kernel. The testing proved that SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time significantly improves the performance of their messaging platform. I invite you to see the results here for yourself.