Novell News

Generally, I’m a fan of taking the high road. I’d much rather talk about what we do than talk about what the competition is doing. But sometimes you can’t let things slide…

Red Hat has recently been out talking about preparing a real time Linux offering later this year. In the course of this, they’ve felt the need to dismiss Novell’s commitment to this area, suggesting we’re not actively participating in community efforts around real time Linux. This is an attempt at distraction to mask a competitive disadvantage – we were first to market with a real-time Linux offering – SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time – which we shipped last October and which we’ve deployed in a number of financial services firms. (There seems to be a pattern here – Red Hat has also been critical of our efforts with Xen virtualization and the Linux desktop, also functionality we brought to the market well before Red Hat). To suggest we’re not constructive contributors to real time efforts in the Linux arena is just plain wrong. All the kernel changes we made to deliver SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time are open source, as required by the GPL, so anyone can take advantage of that technology. We’re now working on the second generation on the product, to be available later this year, and advances there will also be contributed to the community. We’ve embraced efforts to start an initiative around real time directly as part of the Linux kernel community. We have actively engaged and are committed to collaboration for future deliveries based on future versions of the Linux kernel.

Novell has been, is, and will continue to be a major contributor to open source, across a wide range of technologies. Efforts to discredit our leading-edge technologies by questioning our commitment to the community are nothing but FUD.

Congrats to the winners of the recently concluded “Race to Linux 2.0″ context. Hosted by DevX and jointly sponsored by Novell, Mainsoft and IBM, the “Race to Linux 2.0″ challenged developers to see how quickly they could port an application from Windows to Linux. The Novell-sponsored Mono project was one of the key tools developers used in the contest. One of the grand prize winners was Loune Lam, a software developer from Australia, who used Mono to port Microsoft’s Small Business Starter Kit to Linux in 5 hours and 26 minutes.

You can see more about the contest, and the winners, here. Kudos again to the winners, and the nearly 600 participanting developers.

Last week, openSUSE maintainers sent a note to the openSUSE mailing list telling folks that openSUSE will now be focusing on native software management using YaST and ”zypp”, the package management library. As a result, openSUSE 10.3 will not include the ZENworks Management Daemon (zmd).

Here’s what that means:

First, and most important, patch, update and software deployment will remain compatible between SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 and future Novell solutions, so that customers can rest easy that their existing update systems will work for the entire supported life-cycle of their SUSE Linux Enterprise investment.

Some background… openSUSE is the community project on which the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform is built. Novell funds openSUSE, and a large number of the engineers inside Novell are contributors to the openSUSE project. Both openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 include a package management library called “zypp,” which is a combined evolution of package-management infrastructures from Novell (the ZENworks family), traditional SUSE (YaST Online Update) and Ximian (Red Carpet Enterprise). Since the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, the openSUSE community has worked to enhance the capabilities of this “zypp” infrastructure, while maintaining the full enabling of enterprise customers and environments.

Last week, the openSUSE team decided to focus their efforts on YaST and “zypp”. Why? The short answer is that ZENworks is not necessary for openSUSE. openSUSE is targeted at the technical enthusiasts who want a cutting-edge distribution to sample the latest and greatest Linux technology. Most openSUSE users deploy one or two servers in their environment. They don’t need the capabilities inside ZENworks to manage those one or two servers. In order to patch one or two servers in a non-mission-critical environment, the YaST and ”zypp” tools are sufficient.

For those organizations who want to run Linux across their entire infrastructure for mission-critical functions, we recommend SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, our desktop to data center platform. Ane we recommend ZENworks to manage and automate the delivery of policies, software and patches to all servers in the enterprise.

Our engineers continue to work on automatic detection and integration of SUSE Linux Enterprise systems into a ZENworks infrastructure, while maintaining the high standards of interoperability, scalability, security and performance customers expect from Novell technologies. Together, SUSE Linux Enterprise and ZENworks provide a complete enterprise Linux solution that helps customers reduce cost, lower complexity and mitigate risk. The ZENworks component “zmd”, as well as its associated command line and graphic interface tools, remain available and supported for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10. Going forward, ZENworks Linux Management will remain Novell’s solution for enterprise-class resource management for desktops and servers.

We are currently designing SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, which is targeted to provide “interface-compatible” utilities to rug – the command-line interface that complements the ZENworks software management environment. openSUSE delivers most of this interface compatibility in its “zypp” environment. SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 will also include the well known graphical interfaces for software management.

A hot topic for many government and industry organizations is HSPD-12 compliance. How do you deploy scalable and reliable identity management systems that meet federally mandated requirements and still link physical and logical applications.

Novell and Honeywell are hosting a free seminar in Washington D.C. on May 3, to discuss the technology that provides the flexibility and scalability needed to help businesses design and implement the most effective identity management and protection strategy. Experts in technology and physical and logical security will be on hand to share first-hand knowledge on how to evaluate, implement, and integrate an effective approach for your organization.

To learn more and register for the event, go here.

Sunday is Earth Day, and there’s certainly been a lot of media focus on the environment in recent months. The issue of how IT impacts the environment has been a part of this debate. Novell recently announced it had joined the Green Grid, a consortium of IT companies focused on lowering power consumption in data centers. We see virtualization – which allows companies to do more with their existing hardware – as an important potential contributor to reducing both IT power costs and IT waste. With both a virtualization platform – Xen on Linux – as well as management services for virtualized environments, we think we’ve got some good tools that can help companies shrink their data center footprints. Linux, itself, which can run well on older machines, can help companies extend the use of their systems – reducing IT waste – even without virtualization.

A lot of this discussion seems fairly theoretical at this stage. But we suspect there are folks our there that have done some interesting things with Linux and virtualization that have, in fact, both saved on power and extended hardware life. Who’s got a good story? Let us know.

Two large government agencies in China have turned to Novell ZENworks for the management of their desktop computers. Tasked with managing thousands of desktops for tens of thousands of employees in dispersed locations, both Liaoning Electric Power Co. Ltd. and Shenyang Public Security Bureau needed a solution that would allow them to remotely update and manage their employees’ computers. With Novell ZENworks, they are now able manage their desktop computers while reducing routine administration and freeing up IT staff to focus on more strategic and complex tasks.

To learn more about how these organizations are reducing costs and effort, without interrupting service to the citizens of Liaoning province, visit Liaoning Electric Power Co. Ltd. and Shenyang Public Security Bureau.

Matthew O’Neill of HSBC recently spoke to Finextra.com about the bank’s use of open source software, its decision to standardize on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and improving interoperability working with Novell and Microsoft. The eight-minute interview is an interesting listen.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has become an Open Invention Network (OIN) licensee, according to an OIN announcement today. According to the press release, the move provides Ubuntu users and developers with IP protection, protecting Canonical’s investments in Linux and helping to fuel economic growth.

Obviously we support OIN’s mission to spur innovation and protect Linux. Novell is an original member of and contributor to OIN, which was launched in November 2005. Patents owned by OIN are available royalty-free to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System.

Stuart Cohen, former CEO of Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), just launched a new company to “solve shared enterprise IT problems by bringing together companies to develop software at half the cost of outsourcing.” Called Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI), Cohen’s new company is initially working with companies like HP, IBM and Novell.

Evan Bauer, former CTO of Credit Suisse First Boston, will partner with Cohen to lead the projects and develop the technology architecture as chief technology officer for CSI.

The Storage Networking World conference is happening this week in San Diego. Novell will be there demonstrating the Novell ZENworks Orchestrator and its implications for storage.

If you’re at the show stop by the Novell booth to see the demo and learn how storage administrators can easily deploy and manage multiple virtual machines. Additionally, ZENworks Orchestrator will be featured in a Fibre Channel Industry Association end-to-end NPIV demonstration at the SNW lab.

We hope to see you there.