Novell News

Guangdong Mobile Communications Co. in China has more than 50 million telecommunications customers, and the company’s 200 IBM servers located in several sites across the Guangdong province support hundreds of millions of transactions each month. Guangdong Mobile’s Windows environment couldn’t provide the stability and security the company needed, so after testing a variety of alternative solutions, Guangdong Mobile replaced its Windows with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

“We are confident in entrusting our mission-critical applications for banking, CRM and billing to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server,” said Zhuang Zhaowen, senior administrator of the billing center at Guangdong Mobile. “The security is very strong, and we have had no problems at all since we implemented the solution. We have also increased availability significantly, which supports us both in providing first-class services to our customers and in building better relationships with our financial partners.”

Check out more of the story here.

Yesterday was Cyber Monday, the official kickoff of the online holiday shopping season. As consumers flock to the Internet to avoid mall crowds and take advantage of online deals, retailers are increasingly adopting Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) standards to help protect customer credit card data from nefarious cyber criminals. PCI-DSS is an industry standard, developed by major credit card companies, that provides guidelines for merchants on how to protect customer account data at various points during the payment process.

The head of Novell’s identity and security management business Jim Ebzery, has written an article to explain how retailers can use technology to best meet PCI-DSS standards and make credit card payments more secure and worry-free for consumers. The article provides an overview of why retailers should adopt the PCI-DSS standard and offers five steps to help retailers get closer to compliance.

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) Alliance is highlighting today more forward progress for ODF. The public sectors in the Netherlands, South Africa and Korea have all recently taken steps to promote ODF as a standard for document exchange. Membership in the ODF Alliance, which was formed in early 2006 to promote the use of ODF in governments, is nearing the 500 mark, a pretty strong endorsement of the idea of open, standards based computing.

With 30,000 employees and 20 subsidiaries, China’s largest state-owned oil and natural gas enterprise, PetroChina Liaohe Oilfield Company, needed a unified IT strategy to manage their systems across dozens of locations. To get control they turned to ZENworks desktop management.

Learn more about how ZENworks helped them to standardize their desktop environment, insure reliability and cut support costs here.

The 8,000 employees of Watts Water Technologies make innovative products to control the efficiency, safety and quality of water within residential, commercial and institutional applications. To support its new ERP software, Watts Water Technologies chose SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop for use in a thin-client deployment. The company also runs SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on IBM, HP and Dell hardware for its back-end applications, print servers, DNS servers and Legato network backup environment.

“We simply did not have the staff or budget to support a large Microsoft deployment,” said Ty Muscat, data center manager for Watts Water Technologies. “Our thin-client SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop machines require little maintenance. We can support far more Linux servers and desktops with fewer administrators than we could with Microsoft Windows. We also avoid the headaches associated with viruses and constant patching.”

Read more about it here.

Two bits of interesting openSUSE news …

The openSUSE project has introduced its Guiding Principles. The Guiding Principles provide a framework for the project and give a clear view of who the project community is, what it stands for, what the project wants and how it works.

At the same time, the openSUSE project has introduced its first board to lead the overall project. Made up of a combination of Novell employees and external community members, the openSUSE board will act as a central point of contact to help resolve conflicts, communicate community interests to Novell, facilitate communication with all areas of the community, and smooth decision making where needed.

In August we told you it was coming, and yesterday Novell and Dell officially announced in China the availability later this year of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 installed on Dell OptiPlex 330 and 755 commercial desktop PCs in China.

According to Francis Kam, marketing director for Dell, “In the past few years, more and more users have begun to pay attention to the good value, ease of use and safety of Linux. We cooperated with Novell to launch computers with pre-installed SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 operating system to better meet user demand.”

Pre-loaded desktop Linux will continue to grow … watch this space.

Novell’s Jim Ebzery, head of our identity and security management business, helps enterprises break through the data noise and minimize their risk of cyberattacks with this thoughtful piece in Enterprise Systems Journal. Jim discusses the prevalence and one of the causes of cyberattacks and gives pointers on how combining security and event monitoring with identity and access management can help companies sort through the millions of data events they accumulate each day.

Don’t forget to turn your clocks, including computer and gadget clocks, back one hour on Sunday morning at 2:00 am. Beginning this year, the Energy Policy Act passed by Congress has moved daylight saving time back one week to November 4.
On DST, customers face the same issue when they fall back as they did when they sprang forward. While there likely won’t be the ‘y2K’ havoc that was predicted in the spring, un-patched systems could still be affected, but customers using ZENworks Patch Management should be in good shape.