Novell News

Companies in India are making good use of SUSE Linux Enterprise Priority Support for SAP Applications.

Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Company Limited (Café Coffee Day) is a fully integrated coffee company, involved in every activity from growing coffee beans on its 5,000 acres of plantations through harvesting, roasting, blending, exporting and retailing. Based in India, the company runs the popular Café Coffee Day chain of retail outlets, now present in more than 640 locations.

UNITOP Group is one of the largest producers of anionic surfactant chemicals in India with a wide variety of products for use in applications such as agrochemicals, pesticides, oil fields chemicals, pharmaceuticals and personal care products. The group holds the ISO-9001:2000 certification and is headquartered in Mumbai, with an additional ten branch offices around the country.

Café Coffee Day and UNITOP are using SUSE Linux Enterprise Priority Support for SAP Applications to ensure the highest levels of protection for their business-critical ERP applications. With SUSE Linux Enterprise Priority Support for SAP Applications, both companies are getting the performance, reliability and scalability needed from their SAP software — as well as total peace of mind.

In case you missed it, yesterday Lenovo announced its worldwide entry into the server market with its new ThinkServer line, targeted for small and medium businesses. As part of the announcement, Lenovo said its new ThinkServer family will be available with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, Lenovo’s preferred Linux operating system provider. The availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on Lenovo’s ThinkServers will make it easier for customers to install, manage and update their systems, while at the same time enjoy advanced capabilities such as virtualization and high availability clustering.

Novell and Lenovo have partnered for years to deliver innovative, high-value solutions for their customers. For more on how Novell and Lenovo have been working together, go here.

VMworld in Las Vegas is the center of the virtualization world this week. Look for several announcements from Novell and PlateSpin (a Novell company) at the event, learn about some of our virtualization solutions in booths #634 and #628, and listen to our executives present on the industry’s latest trends.

Visitors to the Novell booth (#634) will get to experience SUSE Studio, a Web-based Linux construction kit that empowers users to create their own custom operating system. At special kiosks, attendees can create their own variants of SUSE Linux Enterprise in just minutes, and then burn those images onto a CD to take with them. We will also be highlighting our Linux desktop solution as well as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server running on Hyper-V and VMware. Across the aisle, at the PlateSpin booth (#628) you can learn more about managing virtualization with solutions demos and ongoing theater presentations throughout the show on workload lifecycle management in the data center.

Presentations on virtualization trends include head of the Open Platform Solutions business at Novell Roger Levy discussing the future of Linux and software appliances. Other Novell spokespeople will present on SUSE Studio and how SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the perfect guest for virtual deployments. There will also be PlateSpin presentations on sever consolidation, using server virtualization to support green initiatives, and disaster recovery.

Last month we announced a significant incremental investment in our relationship with Microsoft that included Microsoft’s purchase of up to $100 million in certificates that customers can redeem for expanded support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We also announced plans for new technologies and programs for customers seeking an enterprise-class Linux platform and specifically, optimal Windows Server/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server interoperability solution.

Today, we delivered on these plans by announcing a new joint virtualization solution. This is the first commercial solution to come from the Interoperability Lab based in Cambridge, Mass., and the first complete, fully supported and optimized virtualization solution to span Windows and Linux environments. We’re proud of the achievement, which represents more than 18 months of technical collaboration undertaken between Microsoft and Novell. The solution is fully supported by Microsoft, Novell and participating channel partners, including Computer Integrated Services Company of New York LLC (CIS), Continental Resources Inc., Dell, Insight, Total Tec Systems Inc., and 21Vianet.

At Novell we understand that virtualization is a critical driver for CTOs, who see the clear potential for cost-control, resource optimization and greater business agility. Of the customers that are doing virtualization in their data centers today, IDC says that 22% of servers have already been virtualized, with an expected rise to 45% in 12 months, a $15 billion market opportunity. And most data centers have a mix of technologies.

There is a strong, broad-based market pull for Novell’s virtualization solutions, which span SUSE Linux Enterprise, system management and include our recently acquired PlateSpin technologies. Our team even has their own virtualization blog.

Expect to hear much more about Novell’s virtualization capabilities.

Dell today announced the expansion of its virtualization strategy here.

Included in this announcement, was the news that Dell has chosen software and tools from PlateSpin, a Novell company, to support this strategy. As part of the OEM agreement, Dell will:

• Include PlateSpin PowerConvert software on all PowerEdge servers to enable enterprises to optimize their data center by streaming server workloads over the network between physical servers, virtual hosts and image archives.
• Utilize PlateSpin PowerRecon for the planning and assessment of customer virtualization projects as part of its Virtual Readiness Assessment.
• Sell and support PlateSpin’s broader solutions which provide customers with a unified suite to help them adopt, manage and extend their use of server virtualization in the data center.

In addition, customers can upgrade, through Dell, to full featured versions of both the PowerCovert and PowerRecon products and use them operationally across their infrastructure to improve the speed and quality of data center initiatives and ease the burden of managing mixed IT environments.

Continuing on the theme, Sun announced that it also selected PlateSpin to provide workload assessment and mobility solutions for the deployment of virtual infrastructure in the xVM environment. You can read that announcement here.

Joe Wagner, senior vice president and general manager of Novell System and Resource Management, said of the news, “As our partners begin to craft their virtualization strategies, PlateSpin is bringing industry-leading virtualization solutions to the table. PlateSpin gives customers the flexibility to move seamlessly between the physical and virtual environment, allowing them reduce the costs and risks associated with virtualization projects and pursue their next generation data center with confidence.”

Novell recently posted videos of three Novell experts discussing one of the key security challenges faced by today’s enterprises and how open source innovation can help businesses secure their environments. In the three short videos, Director of Marketing for Identity and Security Andrew Eliopoulos takes a look at what it takes to prove compliance with today’s industry regulations and standards; Vice President of Identity and Security Product Management Nick Nikols focuses on achieving compliance with good governance; and Distinguished Engineer and Bandit project Leader Dale Olds talks about how open source is creating innovative identity and security solutions for mixed IT environments.

Not as exciting as the new series of The Office, but certainly worth a watch.

Novell is working with Omni Technology Solutions and Userful to extend the reach of Linux to schools looking for a low-cost, eco-friendly desktop solution. As part of this promotion, educational institutions (universities, colleges and school districts worldwide) can get a 30-station computer lab or classroom with a free 30-user Desktop Multiplier license from Userful (hardware not included). The first 30 customers will also receive a free 30-user subscription to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

As the best-engineered and most interoperable Linux desktop, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop allows schools to dramatically lower costs and strengthen security, while providing students with dozens of productivity applications like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, GroupWise, instant messaging and photo and music management software.

More details of the promotion can be found here.

One of the industry’s premiere identity conferences, Digital ID World, is taking place in Anaheim, Calif., next week. As one of the market leaders in identity management technology, Novell will be presenting on identity trends and demonstrating some of our latest technologies.

Join us as our VP of identity and security product management, Nick Nikols, presents along with Aveksa, on real world identity services. Novell customers will also be presenting: Sesame Workshop on their successful identity and access management implementation and and Greater Baltimore Medical Center as part of a panel discussion on enterprise single sign-on.

Additionally, Distinguished Engineer and Bandit project leader Dale Olds will explore past, present and future uses of identity and how open source innovation translates into Enterprise benefits. He will also be participating in a panel discussion on the open source community’s contribution to user-centric identity.

In the Novell booth 406, we will be demonstrating our recently launched Compliance Management Platform as well as initiatives from our Bandit project: an Information Card demo highlighting our identity provider with enterprise-ready features such as auditing mode cards and an OTIS (Onramp To Identity Service) demo showcasing our interface to higher level identity services for application developers.

Our resident community manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier has started his new blog at ZDNet, Community, Incorporated. His stated goal: bridging the gap between external communities and the corporate parent, especially (but not limited to) companies working with or sponsoring (or both) open source projects.

The “business of open source” is seen by many as oxymoronic (or is that just plain ‘moronic’?), yet open source software is expected to be a nearly $6 billion business by 2011, according to IDC. And while corporate customers have wholeheartedly adopted open source and the open source model, there is still often a gulf separating the community that drives open source developments and the many companies that sponsor those projects.

Zonker’s well positioned to tackle this problem: he is the community manager for openSUSE, the community Linux distribution sponsored by Novell. Prior to joining Novell, Joe worked as a technology journalist primarily covering the Linux and FOSS beat, and wrote for a number of publications, such as Linux Magazine, Linux.com, Sys Admin, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, Linux Weekly News, Enterprise Linux Magazine, and ZDNet.