Novell News

On November 13 we closed our acquisition of Managed Objects, a leader in the business service management market. The acquisition extends Novell’s strategy of making IT work as one in the data center by adding tools to provide a unified view of all information and workloads. IT and business managers get much needed visibility into how their information systems deliver business services across physical and virtual environments. Managers can then make informed decisions to ensure availability and quality-of-service while improving agility and lowering the total cost of data center management.

The Managed Objects products are very complementary to our existing management and virtualization capabilities. By adding the Managed Objects toolset to the Novell portfolio of data center solutions, we are unique in providing technology-agnostic and proven cross-platform solutions that span both the physical and virtual worlds – all in one unified view. Expect to hear more about our M.O. for Managed Objects soon

On Thursday November 20th US District Judge Dale Kimball entered a final judgment in our long-running case with SCO Group. The judgment restates earlier orders dismissing copyright infringement, slander and breach-of-contract claims brought by SCO, but in addition provides for the dismissal of certain of SCO’s claims without the opportunity for SCO to revive those claims after any appeal.

The entry of the final judgment will now allow SCO to pursue its long threatened appeal from the District Court’s rulings. However, Novell fully expects to prevail in the Court of Appeals. Novell will continue to battle SCO’s claims and believes such efforts will continue to benefit the open source community and all Linux users.

In order to reap the benefits of virtualization, companies are investing in additional networking equipment, including network expansion cards, switches and cables. To help companies reduce costs, increase bandwidth and improve performance of virtual server environments, HP recently announced breakthrough networking, storage and server technologies. The HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet module, a direct connect storage bundle for HP BladeSystem, and the HP ProLiant DL385 G5p server are among HP’s offerings that are helping customers efficiently deploy their virtualized infrastructures. For more information about these new HP technologies, go here.

According to Holger Dryoff, Novell vice president of Product Management for SUSE Linux Enterprise, “Novell will support HP’s new Virtual Connect Flex-10 modules on current and future versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The combination of HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell running on HP’s BL495c blades delivers a powerful, fully supported ‘wire-once’ environment, with enhanced performance, scalability and quality of service. Customers get simplified management and administration of virtual machines and LAN and SAN connections, saving them time and money.”

To learn more about how Novell and HP are working together on innovative technology solutions for their customers, go here.

- from Kerry Kim, Product Marketing Manager for SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time at Novell

Sometimes I get asked to explain the difference between a real time operating system, like SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time, and a general purpose operating system, like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Most people can understand at a higher level that a real time operating system is recommended when predictability of service is important – and that a general purpose operating system can be used for everything else. But when I then start talking about the PREEMPT_RT patch set, and prioritized threads vs. fair scheduling, inevitably I’ll start to see some eyes glaze over.

Sometimes, a picture truly is worth a thousand words. Open source messaging middleware provider ØMQ recently compared the performance of their platform on a real time Linux kernel and standard Linux kernel. The testing proved that SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time significantly improves the performance of their messaging platform. I invite you to see the results here for yourself.

In just two months since it was announced, the “Free the Penguins” promotion has already taken flight. To date, universities and K-12 schools in 29 states and 10 nations have signed-on to the program to help them maximize their IT budgets by cutting desktop computing costs with multi-station SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktops.

Given the success of the program, Novell and our partners, Omni and Userful, have extended the promotion through December 31 to give educational institutions in the U.S. and around the globe the chance to leverage Linux and take advantage of this low-cost, high performance desktop solution.

Go here for more information about this promotion.