12.21.07

Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part IV: Novell’s Business, Legal, and Development News

Posted in GNU/Linux, GPL, IBM, Marketing, Novell, SLES/SLED, Servers at 11:18 pm by Roy Schestowitz

The following is broken down into separate headings for convenience. The news is no more than a week old.

Customers

There are some milestones for Novell in the marketing and sales department. Novatium, for example, has chosen SUSE Linux for Nova netPC. (no, it’s not the NetPC from the previous decade)

Novatium Solutions Pvt. Ltd, one of India’s fastest growing utility computing services providers, has opted to build its entire infrastructure on Novell Open Workgroup Suite, with Novell Identity Manager and eDirectory providing control over users and access rights. Novell Open Workgroup Suite provides a comprehensive infrastructure and productivity solution, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Another case of SUSE deployment in Idaho comes to light.

Idaho Power deployed a central management server and five scan engines that implement agentless information gathering, including using WMI (Windows Management Interface) and other techniques to gather configuration information from more than 400 Windows Server 2000 and 2003 systems, as well as approximately 50 SUSE Linux servers. (CCM also can collect configuration information about network infrastructure and applications.)

Novell GroupWis scores a possible win as the release of an OCS successor is approaching.

The Email Workshop is now examining Google Applications for Education (Google Apps), Zimbra Collaboration Suite, Mirapoint, and Novell GroupWise as potential new email servers. It will consider each option on a seven-part criterion, which takes account security and privacy, cost, a rich feature set, usability, peer-institution adoption, system integration, and reliability, all into account, Nelson said.

Nelson described Mirapoint and Novell as “enterprise-level workhorses,” while Google Apps and Zimbre are “new on the scene” and working towards reaching enterprise level.

Partnerships

SAP, which is engaged in a deal with Novell, gave it a pat on the back.

SAP is recommending SUSE as its preferred Linux platform, the stuff of which stacks are made, and Novell is going start being the first line of defense for people running SAP applications on SUSE.

We mentioned Likewise/Centeris and its relationship to Novell before. Here is an update on this situation. There’s nothing too malicious (e.g. exclusionary, discriminatory) about it.

On the subject of Microsoft, Crist noted that while the software giant is working on Linux interoperability with Novell, integration of Active Directory with Linu is not one of the projects involved (they are working on interoperability between Microsoft Active Directory and Novell eDirectory based on WS-Federation and WS-Security, however), giving it a good opportunity to work with both parties.

Indeed, the company is working with Novell on locking down its customer’s SLED deployments with Likewise Enterprise using existing Active Directory group policies.

A close partner of Novell, Novacoast, has acquired a company.

Mr. Anderson continued, “Eiseman Consulting Group brings quality client relationships to Novacoast in New York and extends our Novell relationship into a market that will offer high growth for both organizations.”

Datacentre

A Novell VP wrote a piece for Industry Week. It’s about being green in the datacentre. Here is an introduction to the author, who does not use this placement as an opportunity for self promotion of Novell, but rather arguably for an individual self-promotional message.

By Joe Wagner, senior vice president and general manager, Systems and Resource Management, Novell

Benchmarks for servers in the datacentres are proposed which also take account of greeness. Novell’s SUSE earns a mention.

For the first forty years of the systems and server market, price/performance was basically the only metric that mattered within a given class of machines. But in the 21st century, when power and cooling issues are thwarting the attempts of companies to continue adding computing capacity at the rates they did in years gone by, there will be a new metric that people will start to pay attention to: performance/watt. To that end, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation has just release its first benchmark that gauges the performance and power consumption of servers.

[...]

Demonstrating how badly AMD needs quad-core “Barcelona” Opterons in the field, a two-socket CX2266-N2 server made by Colfax International using 2.4 GHz Opteron 2216 HE - these are the energy efficient Opterons - did only 95,853 ops/sec on the test running Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 and the JRockit JVM; this machine had 16 GB of DDR2 main memory. This server drew roughly the same power as the Xeon boxes above, but its significantly reduced performance gave it a very low 203 overall ssj_ops/watt.

IBM gives SUSE a good mention in its press released on visualising social networks.

– Expanded support for operating systems such as SUSE Linux, browsers
such as Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and directories such as Microsoft Active
Directory, enabling businesses to deploy and integrate social software
across their IT environment.

Novell vs SCO

SCO’s lawsuit is listed among the dumbest moves.

3. SCO suit gets slapped down. “The judge slapping down SCO in the SCO vs. IBM/Novell lawsuit was the smartest move,” says Andreas Antonopoulos, founding partner at Nemertes Research and a Network World columnist. “It was a completely frivolous lawsuit by SCO against Linux when it sued IBM and Novell for intellectual property infringement and then failed to prove it. It was great that it got dismissed.”

Novell Gives Back

One admirable contribution of Novell is the open source ATI/AMD driver. A new release of that driver came just before the end of the week. HDMI support was added as well.

The xf86-video-radeonhd driver has today received support to handle HDMI (High Definition Media Interface) connectors. While if you’ve used a DVI to HDMI dongle with the RadeonHD driver it would have worked already (as we shared in our recent ATI HDMI Linux article) this support is for those with integrated connectors.

The next batch of news will come on December 29^th, as usual. █

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