Novell News

We got a bit carried away in our excitement around early momentum for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10. In our press release last Friday, we indicated we’d had 286,000 unique visitors to our new Novell Customer Center. That should have read 286,000 page views. So we wanted to set the record straight. In any case, a strong showing of interest in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.

Check out the ComputerWeekly article on how Standard Life, the UK-based insurance company, is successfully using Novell ZENworks Asset Management to gain control of complex software licensing arrangements and better understand their software usage. ZENworks Asset Management is giving Standard Life the ability to clearly see their licensing rights and requirements. This has giving the company not just piece of mind, but also more competitive position when negotiating licensing terms with suppliers. As a result, Standard Life is in control and reaping the benefits of asset management. And for more information see the Novell Standard Life success story.

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian is participating in a panel on open source at the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford on Wednesday, July 26, at 10:30 am Pacific. AlwaysOn provides a streaming webcast of all the Summit sessions. You can find that here. Ron is on a panel along with Martin Mickos of MySQL and several other open source execs addressing the question, “Will All Software Go Open Source?” The AlwaysOn Summit is focused on innovation, with a good balance between consumer and enterprise technology. There’s some good content, if you can find the time to listen. I hope you can catch Ron’s panel.

A group of Dutch community colleges have banded together to create RedSpider, an identity management system based on Novell Identity Manager. This innovative system manages user accounts for 12 colleges and more than 150,000 staff and students across the Netherlands. User information is entered only once, but is accessible by all RedSpider community colleges. Students benefit with a single user name and password for all systems no matter where they are taking classes. The results: time saved and costs lowered. We could all learn a thing or two from RedSpider.

Defense and government contractor Raytheon has selected high-performance computing systems from SGI to help fulfill an existing contract between Raytheon and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to provide the computational resources to run mathematical models and computer simulations to help better understand global climate change.As you might have guessed, the systems run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. High-performance computers need a high-performance operating system.

You’ve probably seen our news today about the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10. You can read the announcement so I won’t rehash it … and you can see it all for yourself if you get a chance to come by the Novell booth in August at LinuxWorld in San Francisco.I did want to point out IBM’s announcement today, supporting SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 with its included Xen virtualization. IBM exec Scott Handy said, “This combination of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 and Xen offers clients the most innovative open technology solution in the market today for running virtualized IT environments.” Novell and its partners like IBM are working hard to get innovation such as Xen virtualization into the hands of customers as soon as it’s ready, because for many, like the adage says, time is money …

Novell distinguished engineer Dale Olds talks about the Bandit Project with Aldo Castaeda from the Story of Digital Identity. In addition to Bandit, Dale shares his thoughts ondissolving enterprise boundaries making identity management more about interoperability leveraging open source models applying user-centric computing in enterprise identity system deployments Take a listen to the podcast here. Leave yourself some extra time — the interview lasts around 45 minutes.

Novell is at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference this week in Boston this week. Why, you ask? e-Security, acquired by Novell in April of this year, was a long-time Microsoft partner. We are continuing that relationship and will be talking about Sentinel, Novell Identity Manager and Novell ZENworks with other Microsoft partners all week! So far, we’ve gotten some great feedback on our attendance. So while the name e-Security may be phased out, the great product — now known as Sentinel from Novell — is still getting rave reviews. Check out this article from Federal Computer Week. “Although Sentinel does have a big role to play in the compliance space, it has an even bigger role in tracking the security on your network and providing a detailed, auditable listing of events, in real time and during long periods of time. Once its operating, youre unlikely to have your security policy violated without your knowledge.”

Sybase and IBM set a record, and they used SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell to do it. This one is a new transaction processing performance record for 2-core systems, set by delivering 81,439 transactions per minute on the leading TPC-C benchmark.In addition to beating an earlier Linux record, it also beats the previous 2-core HP/Opteron and Microsoft SQL Server performance record running on Windows.

The Open PR blog has been a little quiet the last week … apparently there was much barbecuing to be done. Now that that is taken care of, we’ll get things rolling again with a link to a story about a cool Novell customer you may have heard of — Audi.Audi updates its high-performance computing clusters every few years, and when it came time to update its crash simulation cluster and its aerodynamics and CFD cluster, they contracted with vendors who both (separately) provided their solutions running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. In Audi’s behalf, both Linux Networx and IBM took advantage of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server’s excellent performance in demanding enterprise environments. And obviously, Audi had a great deal of freedom to select the hardware it needed.Insert your own “Audi in the driver’s seat” comment here.