Novell News

I was looking for inspiration for a “year in review” blog post, but Jeff Jaffe, our CTO, just posted a great overview of the progress we’ve made in the last year in implementing our strategy around enterprise-wide Linux and enterprise management services. So, I’ll cop out and point to Jeff for a good synopsis of Novell’s progress in 2007. Read it here.

While many of us will be taking a few days off over the holidays, India’s premier electronic commodity exchange, the National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange Limited (NCDEX), will be running 24/7. A global community trading company, NCDEX has 25,000 traders and provides online information on news, stock and commodity prices, and other trading information. As a financial services company, NCDEX requires rock solid process monitoring and compliance reporting and they have picked Novell Sentinel to help them with this. NCDEX will use Novell Sentinel to automate data collection, provide a centralized view of the data collected, protect against network intrusion, and simplify auditing and reporting to regulators.

Folks who are using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (as opposed to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10) will be interested to know that Service Pack 4 for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 is now available.

In addition to kernel updates and security fixes, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP4 contains new features such as new driver support for certain chip sets, iSCSI and platforms other than i386. Other cool new functionality that has been back-ported from SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 includes virtualization, memory management and multi-pathing. Check it out!

Novell has launched a new website to provide resources and information for merchants looking to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). As consumers whip out their credit cards for holiday shopping this year, PCI-DSS is top of mind for merchants as it requires retailers to protect credit card data at various points during the payment process.

PCI-DSS means a safer shopping season for consumers, but for retailers it means meeting a stringent set of requirements. For Novell, PCI-DSS means leveraging our strengths in identity and security to help retailers implement solutions that allow them to be PCI-DSS compliant. Check out our new PCI-DSS solutions website here.

Looking to understand what automated virtualization can do for your enterprise?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and in a recent ZDNet “At the Whiteboard” episode, Richard Whitehead, Novell’s director of product marketing for systems and resource management, takes just three minutes to illustrate how automation can bridge the gap between physical and virtual machines. Check it out here.

ebizQ’s Peter Schoof has posted comments from Novell on what’s on the horizon for identity and access management in 2008. One key comment from Novell — convergence is going to be big in 2008. Read more here.

Novell continues to make inroads into providing identity management solutions for federal agencies looking to comply with HSPD-12 mandates. HSPD-12 or Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, establishes a government-wide standard for identification credentials (or smart cards) that deliver a common, two-factor authentication method for accessing physical and logical assets. Just recently, government information technology vendor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) announced that it, along with its team members, has been awarded a certificate of completion for its HSPD-12 vendor evaluation. Team members include Novell, Honeywell, ImageWare and ActivIdentity.

Last week, Novell began shipping SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 for running high-performance, time-sensitive applications, and apparently Red Hat is feeling a bit threatened.

Note to Red Hat: this is open source, remember? Novell is shipping tested and enterprise-hardened Linux with real time capabilities. Just because Red Hat is again late to market (see enterprise Linux desktop, Xen virtualization, etc.) doesn’t mean Linux contains “beta code.” SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time is already run in production environments, providing real services to real customers like Thomson Financial. For the record, Novell has contributed a vast amount of code to real time Linux, as have many others, including MontaVista, Wind River and Concurrent. But don’t take our word for it. Check out the real time community mailing list to see who is making serious contributions to this open source product.

Red Hat often speaks of the value of the open source model because it encourages more and faster innovation. That’s what Novell is about with SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time and our other enterprise Linux offerings, to provide innovation to our customers in time to make a greater difference in their businesses. By claiming to be the source of all good things open source and Linux, Red Hat is doing neither the community nor its customers any favors. As the ZDNet.co.uk blogger noted, “It could all be sour grapes because Novell got there first …” That seems like sound insight.

On a related note, some sites have picked up on Red Hat’s comments and written headlines like “Novell accused of reselling Red Hat code.” Again, this is open source. It isn’t Red Hat code any more than the millions of lines of code contributed by Novell and others to dozens of open source projects belong to any one organization or individual. That’s the open source model … just like Red Hat used to talk about.