Novell News

With data centers heating up and power costs rising, Processor magazine has just published suggestions from experts on how to reduce cooling and save power in the data center.  It also includes some tips from Novell senior vice president and general manager Joe Wagner. Check it out here. 

DesktopLinux.com has just posted the results of its 2007 survey of desktop Linux users. As we are all seeing, desktop Linux usage continues to grow. Of note, 2007’s poll produced 38,500 votes versus 14,535 last year. Of interest to Novell followers, openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop are used by 21 percent of the polled user base this year, compared to 13 percent in 2006. There’s also interesting usage info on desktop environments, browsers, e-mail clients, etc.

Full survey results are here.

You may have seen the recent announcement about the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) in India rolling out SUSE Linux Enterprise across 30,000 desktops and 1,880 servers. But there’s video from ELCOT, too … you don’t want to miss the marching penguins.

Today’s acquisition of XenSource by Citrix along with VMware’s recent IPO are additional indicators of virtualization’s move from a well-understood technical issue to a business story. Novell is pleased to be in the middle of this conversation with our enterprise-class Xen virtualization offering in SUSE Linux Enterprise, plus Novell ZENworks Orchestrator is one of the only real cross-OS, cross-virtualization management offerings on the market. Interestingly enough, we just yesterday announced another virtualization customer success at Casio Computer.

For those of you who missed the LinuxWorld show last week, we’ve got video of Ron’s keynote here. John Dragoon also did a couple of video blogs from the show, which you can see here and here. John has been pretty active on his blog lately, so it’s a good one to get into your blog feeder if you’re interested in things Novell.

Novell CMO John Dragoon has expanded a bit on the SCO decision. Read his thoughts here.

From Joe LaSala, Novell senior vice president and general counsel:

“In the spring of 2003, Novell set out to ensure that SCO’s groundless claims would not interfere with the development of Linux. Today’s court ruling vindicates the position Novell has taken since the inception of the dispute with SCO, and it settles the issue of who owns the copyrights of UNIX in Novell’s favor. The court’s ruling has cut out the core of SCO’s case and, as a result, eliminates SCO’s threat to the Linux community based upon allegations of copyright infringement of UNIX. We are extremely pleased with the outcome.”

In case you missed them, there were a few more interesting announcements relating to Novell at LinuxWorld this week.

AMD announced the availability of AMD Validated Server platforms certified for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, giving solution providers an easier, faster and less expensive process by which to obtain certified and pre-configured Linux-based server platforms.

And IBM announced an integrated open collaboration client for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, along with a Big Green Linux initiative supported by Novell to help clients further integrate Linux into the enterprise as a way to reduce costs and energy consumption by building cooler data centers.

Update, Aug. 9: AMD dropped one more today, announcing various vendor support for AMD’s native Quad-Core Opteron processor, code-named “Barcelona.” Highlight?

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 is the first production-level operating system to support Barcelona’s enhanced virtualization feature, Rapid Virtualization Indexing.

Hard on the heels of yesterday’s announcement with Lenovo about the upcoming availability of Lenovo ThinkPads preloaded with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop comes Dell’s news that we’re working together to offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop factory installed on Dell consumer notebooks and desktops in China (see heading “Update: 8/7, 3PM CDT” a few paragraphs down in the Dell blog entry). Desktop Linux continues to pick up steam, and we’re doing what we can to make it easier for enterprise customers around the world to make it their choice.

Novell is hosting a series of free web seminars in August, September and October focusing on our identity, security and systems management solutions. The six part series is a great opportunity to learn how identity-driven services from Novell can simplify expanding IT environments, minimize IT effort and secure organizations against unknown threats. Get more information here.