With Open Enterprise Server 11, customers will be able to:

+ Streamline management across one Linux platform–SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP1
+ Get improved update and patching performance
+ Do more with file storage, using enhanced storage management through Novell Linux Volume Manager
+ Enjoy improved VMware compatibility for virtualizing Open Enterprise Server
+ Regularly receive new features and enhancements via the new Feature Channel, eliminating the long wait for the next support pack
+ Join the preview program for Novell Filr–and be entitled to licenses once it ships

Novell Open Enterprise Server 11 is both a mature product and the platform for file and print innovation, satisfying customers all over the world.   Users are still working with files–in more ways on more devices–and Novell is leading the pack in delivering solutions that allow them the flexibility they need, while allowing IT to maintain organizational control.

Click here to read why IDC recommends Open Enterprise Server.

For more information on Open Enterprise Server 11, watch the video and read about the solution features at www.novell.com/oes.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware – and our alliance with VMware inked in September 2010 – continues to offer vSphere customers a proven enterprise Linux distribution for their virtualized environments. This is yet another proof point of SUSE’s commitment to deliver the best products, services and solutions to our customers.  According to a statement from Nils Brauckmann, President and General Manager of SUSE in a May 2011 press release:

"By operating SUSE as a separate business unit focused on the Linux marketplace, we can accelerate our delivery of high-value Linux solutions that help organizations enhance growth, reduce costs, tame complexity and spur innovation. We have the world-class engineering resources, partners and state-of-the-art technologies to succeed. Now we are sharpening our focus on making SUSE Linux Enterprise the preeminent Linux distribution across physical, virtual and cloud environments."

If you’re attending VMworld this week, stop by booth #747 to learn if you qualify to:

• Get SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware vSphere
• Receive patches and updates to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware at no cost
• Run unlimited number of virtual machines per qualified vSphere host

In addition, vSphere customers can streamline their support experience by receiving technical support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware directly from VMware.

For more information, check out VMware's announcement and download the Getting Started Guide.

With the recent acquisition of Novell by Attachmate, there has been some uncertainty around the future of the SUSE Appliance program. However, with today's announcement of SUSE Studio v1.2, the newly formed SUSE group has put that uncertainty to rest. The updated version of SUSE Studio will be available in two editions -Standard Edition which is primarily targeted towards ISVs and Advanced Edition which is primarily for enterprise organizations. One of the new features that is only included in Advanced Edition is the support for System Z. SUSE Enterprise Linux has long been the market leading Linux on System Z, so it is no surprise that customers have been clamoring for such a feature.
Other updates that are included in both versions of the products include 1-click deployment to Amazon EC2, enhanced versioning, rebuilding and changelog, and better integration with other SUSE products like SUSE Manager and Sentinel Log Manager.
IDC believes software appliances can play a key role in building out cloud deployments. This is why IDC forecasts the packaged software appliance market to grow to $3.7 billion by 2014. The ability to create and maintain one piece of software and deploy anywhere is an essential piece to automating your private, public and hybrid cloud deployments. And now with SUSE Studio's support for System Z, enterprises can use one tool for version control across x86, public cloud and System Z deployments reducing the overhead associated with managing a heterogeneous environment.

In order to help our customers assure their cluster configurations are running at peak performance, SUSE has teamed with the high availability experts at LINBIT to offer a cluster stack health check service.

The LINBIT Cluster Stack Health Check is an extensive check-up for Linux high availability clustering solutions, such as the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension. LINBIT's Professional Services provides a thorough examination of an organization's cluster stack and a detailed best practice report with recommended enhancements to help customers get the most from their high availability cluster configurations.

Are your clusters running at peak performance, particularly the mission critical components?  SUSE customers with a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription can get LINBIT's highly-effective Cluster Stack Health Check for a special price until December 31, 2011.  Click here for more information.

This week, Novell, SUSE and openSUSE joined the ranks of Google, Facebook and more than 1000 other participating websites for the Internet Society-organized World IPv6 Day.  During the June 8 global-scale trial of the new Internet Protocol, IPv6, more than 400 participating organizations enabled IPv6 on their main services for 24 hours.  Success!

According to this week's Internet Society newsletter

By providing a coordinated 24-hour “test flight”, the event helped demonstrate that major websites around the world are well-positioned for the move to a global IPv6-enabled Internet, enabling its continued exponential growth.

The June 8, 2011 event demonstrated that major websites around the world, including Novell, SUSE and openSUSE are well-positioned for the move to the next generation Internet protocol.

Check if you and your provider is IPv6 ready by clicking http://test-ipv6.com/.  If your ISP does not support IPv6, click here for advice.

Guest post:  Holger Dyroff, Vice President of Business Development, SUSE

SUSE has been asked about Oracle's proposal to contribute OpenOffice.org to the  Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and what this means for our engagement in LibreOffice and the Open Document Foundation.

SUSE appreciates this move by Oracle.  Donating Open Source software and associated trademarks to an independent organization is always a positive.

At the same time, SUSE is continuing to invest in LibreOffice and The Document Foundation. We have migrated our existing customers to LibreOffice, and continue to add new subscription customers for LibreOffice on both Linux and Windows.  Alongside the community and many other Linux vendors, we will further enhance LibreOffice with a continued focus on customer needs such as interoperability.

Customers with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop or LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org for Windows subscriptions can be assured that they will receive enterprise support for a fully compatible, best of breed open source office suite – now and in the future.

SUSE is looking forward to the future contributions of IBM and potentially others into this new ASF incubator project, but would certainly have liked to see such contributions go directly to LibreOffice. We will follow the incubation process very closely to understand future opportunities and possibilities which can improve our offerings for our users and customers.

We also encourage the Apache Software Foundation and The Document Foundation to engage in a fruitful discussion which will lead to an even more vibrant open source office community.

As a result of this increased focus on our core market, we will better align our future investments with business results.  Focusing on what matters most to customers is the key to our innovation strategy and will drive the growth of our business.  This has meant reductions in certain areas, such as Mono.  However, Mono remains part of the SUSE business and should customer demand for Mono products accelerate, our development efforts will rapidly respond.  Regardless, we will continue to provide maintenance and support for all Mono products – MonoTouch, Mono for Android, Mono Tools for Visual Studio and SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension.

Our robust support for other OSS projects continues as strong as ever.  We're ardent supporters of openSUSE, Linux kernel, Xen, KVM, GNOME, KDE and Linux-HA, among countless others.  Since the company's founding in 1992, open source has been at the heart of our business and we look forward to playing a pivotal role in numerous open source communities for decades to come.  SUSE remains a Gold Member of the Linux Foundation and we are privileged to provide financial support, development contributions, technical expertise, mentorship and promotional support to many of the people and organizations that make our Linux ecosystem so dynamic.

We're excited about the future of SUSE, as our increased focus will help us better serve customers and ultimately take share in this rapidly growing market.  IDC's recent report on the Linux market shows that Novell/SUSE has increased our market share in each of the last three years – the only vendor to do so!  With an even sharper focus on our core business, greater prominence for the SUSE brand, and closer collaboration with customers, partners and communities, we're aiming even higher.

OBS is aimed at software packagers and offers two key functions: an easy-to-use command line interface and web interfaces with powerful collaboration features that include change tracking, project teams, access rights and merge requests. Packages are built in a distributed fashion using virtual machines for operating system- and architecture-independent compilation. Also, as part of the program, SUSE is collecting requirements for OBS and incorporating them into the OBS planning process. SUSE will be working with partners to enable them to offer implementation and consulting services for Open Build Service.

According to Ralph Dehner, CEO at B1 Systems, "In the past B1 Systems has written build environments for the customers by itself. With the open Build Service now exists a "standard" which makes it easy to build packages for different distributions and architectures. This will be also interesting for many other open source projects."

OBS is developed in a collaborative fashion by the openSUSE project with contributions from a variety of partners including the Linux Foundation, Intel and Dell. OBS Developer Services offers commercial support options for customers and partners that want to run their own instance of the Open Build Service.

You can read the full release here: openSUSE renames OBS

Watson runs on IBM’s high-performance, high-capacity Power servers and SUSE Linux Enterprise is the fastest operating system on POWER7, making it an ideal choice for Watson.

Containing more than 200 million digital pages of information and operating at a speed of over 80 teraflops in its digital “brain,” Watson uses a combination of deep analytics and rapid processing speeds that can interpret the types of “natural language” questions used in the long-running game show.

IBM’s DeepQA software, which runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, on 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers, powers the technology for those contestants who appear on “Jeopardy!” The POWER7® platform is known for its ability to meet high-performance, high-capacity and near-linear scaling. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the fastest operating system on IBM POWER7, based on recent SPEC benchmarks, and thus a natural choice for IBM’s DeepQA software powering Watson.

Since 1993, SUSE Linux Enterprise engineers have made significant contributions to the advancement and tuning of the Linux kernel and key kernel-related performance technologies. With advanced memory management, new processor support, unmatched performance on systems with multicore processors, Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL) and advanced multipathing and I/O capabilities, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the clear choice for high-performance computing systems. It outperforms competitive systems in performance and scalability for large-scale server deployments, on industry standard blades and servers, mid-range systems and on high-end mainframes.

This is another significant achievement for Linux which currently runs most of the top supercomputers. Only a Linux operating system has the flexibility and computing capacity to run one of the world’s most powerful computers.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor for InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Kerner has been writing for InternetNews.com since 2003 and covers Linux, Open Source, security, application development and networking. You can read his news stories here, catch his blog posts here, or follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

"When I heard about the Dister awards, I knew I had to be involved,” said Kerner. “I've been interested in SUSE Studio since the day I first heard Nat Friedman talk about it and have been a user for almost as long. There really isn't anything quite comparable to it and the level of innovation is astounding. I can't wait to see what people submit."

Judges recently announced for the panel are Labs Editor in Chief at eWeek Jason Brooks, openSUSE Community Manager Jos Poortvliet, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Open Platform Solutions at Novell Markus Rex, Blogger and Contributor Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols and Executive Director of the Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin.

The submission deadline for the Dister Awards is November 1. Go here for more information and to enter.