Novell News

In this podcast, Novell’s Community Manager, Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, talks with Andreas Jaeger, about his responsibilities as the openSUSE program manager, the history of the project, the challenges and opportunity of cultivating the community as well as what’s coming up in the future releases for openSUSE. Take a listen.

 

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On July 21 Novell announced its Cloud Security Service offering that is currently in development and slated for release later this year. The service will enable cloud providers and software as a service (SaaS) vendors to ensure their offerings meet the strict security and compliance standards required by global businesses.

As part of our beta group, Novell is working with PivotLink, a provider of business intelligence solutions delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS). Early results of this collaboration effort were demonstrated at a Cloud Single Sign-On (SSO) interoperability event at Catalyst Conference North America on July 29, 2009. Participants included SalesForce.com, Google Apps, eXpresso Corp, WebEx and others.

By working with Novell, PivotLink can better support their customer’s security standards and policies in a cloud computing environment. This is done by integrating PivotLink’s existing business intelligence application and database security with Novell’s access management technologies so PivotLink can deliver secure single sign-on to its enterprise customers.

In this podcast, Dale Olds, distinguished engineer at Novell, and Mike Van Gorkom, program manager at PivotLink, discuss the results of the interoperability event at Catalyst.

SSO is one aspect of Novell Cloud Security Service, more can be found on our website: www.novell.com/cloud.

 

 Novell and PivotLink discuss security assurance and trust in cloud computing [9:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Novell is carefully studying the decision of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. We are pleased that the decision affirmed the district court’s monetary award of approximately $3M from SCO to Novell. On other issues such as ownership of the UNIX copyrights, on which SCO’s claims against Novell, IBM, and Linux users depend, the Court remanded the case for trial. Precisely what will happen next in the lawsuit remains to be seen, especially in light of the pending SCO bankruptcy and the recent court decision to appoint a Chapter 11 Trustee to take over the business affairs of the company.

Novell intends to vigorously defend the case and the interests of its Linux customers and the greater open source community. We remain confident in the ultimate outcome of the dispute.

The Linux Foundation has announced an update to its paper on who is contributing code to the Linux kernel. A few highlights:
- Since 2008 there has been a roughly 10% increase in the number of developers contributing to each kernel release cycle.
- Kernel growth is high and increasing, with more than 10,000 patches in each recent kernel release.
- More than 1000 developers from around 200 corporations are contributing to kernel releases

Novell has a strong showing — SUSE developer Greg Kroah-Hartman is a co-author of the paper and Novell continues to be one of the top named contributors to the Linux kernel.

Novell’s Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier sat down with Paul Krill, editor-at-large at InfoWorld and Ross Turk, community manager for Source Forge at OSCON in July to discuss the show, what’s happening with open source communities and companies these days and how to build an effective community. They even touch on what open source projects and journalism have in common.

 

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 oscon_roundtable.ogg: Download

Last week, Roland Haidl posted a note to the openSUSE Project mailing list about the new multiplier team for openSUSE. The team will report to Roland Haidl, who is the director of operations and communities for Open Platform Solutions. This means that openSUSE will have several engineers who are exclusively tasked with working on the openSUSE Project as part of Novell’s strategy to focus on the openSUSE Project as part of the core Open Platform Solutions mission.

What’s even more, this team will be tasked with building the openSUSE community and working directly with contributors. Community building will be a key responsibility, because while Novell is committing resources to the development of openSUSE, it is even more important to cultivate, nurture and encourage its contributors. And at the end of the day the strength of the open source model and the success of openSUSE lies in the size and commitment of the community.

by Brian Singer, product marketing manger, Identity and Security, Novell

One of the trends we noticed when we started developing Novell Sentinel Log Manager is that when organizations realize they need a compliance strategy, the first place they look is log management. A log management tool can take care of a good portion of your PCI-DSS, SOX, and HIPPA requirements right out of the box. If you look at what’s actually deployed and used today, you will see a lot of organizations trying to fulfill all their compliance needs only using a log management tool.

The problem with this approach is while you may be able to meet the bare minimum in terms of compliance, that’s not good enough anymore. Compliance mandates from government and industry bodies try to mitigate overall risk. However, in this world, simply being compliant is not enough – just read this story in Bank InfoSecurity about a recent data breach of a company that was PCI-compliant.  As Ben Goodman mentions in this ZDNet article, information that could have prevented a data breach is often available prior to the breach, but not acted upon.

Organizations are beginning to realize they need to do more with their data than just report to auditors where its stored and archived every quarter. This presents a problem.  Most log management tools were originally built for the singular purpose of collecting and archiving logs. Providing the capability to analyze the data was an afterthought, and was shoehorned in by most vendors. They store log files in proprietary formats, and don’t provide a way to access the data using outside analytic tools. You know the information to stop a breach is in your log files, but you can only get at that data with tools provided by your inflexible log management vendor! That’s the problem we set out to solve. Sentinel Log Manager stores data in an open flat-file format, which means you can get access to the data with any tool from any vendor you choose. It’s also extremely easy to forward event monitoring feeds, which gives you flexibility as your security needs grow and change.

Log Management is the starting point on the path to compliance and security, but it is clearly not the destination. If your log management tool isn’t giving you control over your data, it’s not too late to express your inner control freak and take back what is yours.

Recently, we announced the nation’s fourth-largest optical retailer, National Vision, was standardizing its retail locations on SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service to centrally manage 5,000 devices spread across its stores. Today we’re announcing the availability of the latest version of the only enterprise-class Linux operating system tailored specifically for the retail industry, SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service 11.

With SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service 11, retailers can leverage the power of Linux and open source with a reliable, flexible and open platform for point of service/point of sale terminals, kiosks, self-service systems and reverse-vending systems. SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service helps retailers accelerate customer checkout, improve the customer experience, work more efficiently with partners, and enhance overall store operations.

Key benefits of SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service 11 include:
- Reduced ownership costs with no operating system licensing fees. Retailers pay only for maintenance subscriptions and services. They also receive upgrade protection while their subscription is active so they can move to the latest version at any time.
- Lower operational costs. Retailers can re-purpose old machines for point of sale servers and extend the life of legacy systems.
- Common code with all other products in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Platform. IT staff can work across the entire infrastructure from point of sale terminals to servers and mainframe, consolidating skills and avoiding additional costs for training.
- Freedom from vendor lock-in. SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service supports the open standards pervasive in retail environments today. Retailers can access the underlying source code, making it easier to customize their POS systems. Additionally, retailers can use SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service on any hardware system while their subscription is active as it is not tied to a specific device.
- A strong ecosystem of hardware, application, consulting, training and support vendors. Technology leaders, such as IBM, NCR, SAP and Oracle, support SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service, ensuring world-class retail environments. By integrating Novell partner solutions, retailers can deploy additional store applications such as inventory management, cash management, workforce management and loss prevention.

For more information on SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service 11, go here.

iPhone and Blackberry. PC and Apple. The Yankees and the Red Sox. Can any of these great rivalries ever hash out the differences between them? Now there’s a place to find out, a new website called hash-it-out.com. Fueled by Twitter, Hash It Out tracks some of the hottest topics being debated.

The website was launched as part of Novell’s ongoing mission to make IT work as one.

The idea behind Hash It Out is based on the increasingly popular use of “hash tags” on Twitter. For instance, if someone is interested in open source programming, they can follow related discussions by tracking tweets that use the hash tag “#opensource.”

Hash-It-Out.com not only tracks and analyzes these hash tags, it matches up the most popular—and some pretty unexpected ones too—in a side-by-side competition with their rivals. The website then analyzes current Twitter posts to see how often these topics are mentioned, and how passionate Twitter users can be about their favorite topics. Coke versus Pepsi. Chrome versus Internet Explorer. Rock n’ Roll versus Country Music. They all have competitions on Hash It Out.

Can these rivalries ever work as one? Check out Hash It Out and see.

If you’ve seen the movie Madagascar, you know that King Julien likes to “move it, move it.” Well, so does PlateSpin, according to a headline from a podcast posted at Virtual Strategy Magazine. The podcast covers the history of PlateSpin, highlights the recently release PlateSpin Migrate product, and discusses how all the PlateSpin Workload Management products work together. Check out the podcast here.