01.19.08

Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part III: Novell Products… From [A]MD to [Z]enworks

Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, Hardware, Identity Management at 7:02 am by Roy Schestowitz

Market penetration follows good execution…

Here are some of the past week’s stories about Novell products.

Login/Authentication

Novell’s single sign-on has added support for Windows Vista.

Novell has announced enhancements to its single sign-on solution, including support for Windows Vista, improved authentication capabilities, easier administration and expanded applications support.

Fujitsu’s collaboration with Novell bears fruit. It also earns some new clients.

Logica’s technology incorporating biometric technology in the form of a fingerprint reader, developed along with its partners Novell, Fujitsu and 123ID, is currently being employed in Logica’s new web site Annesdiary.com, the world’s first secure social networking site for girls ages 6-14. The site, which was launched in November, is based on the novel Anne of Green Gables and is seeing increasing enrollment as girls and parents around the world are seeking a safe website for establishing friendships within a secure online community.

Identity Management

Here is a new product review of Novell Identity Manager 3.5.

Novell Identity Manager is a complete identity management system, a workflow system that simplifies both provisioning and binding users to objects, a compliance auditing system, single sign-on, a designer component that allows drag and drop development of policies and workflows and a user interface that is both comprehensive and easy to use.

Novell’s Jim Ebzery talks about the important role of identity management in the following new article.

Insider threats, ID theft and adhering to strict compliance rules and regulations will be the main security pains facing IT managers and CIOs in 2008, according to the head of security at enterprise software firm Novell.

In a forecast for 2008, Jim Ebzery, senior vice-president of Identity and Security Management at Novell said even though the internet has made it easier to get information and services, it can be a dangerous place to compute.

ZENWorks

A press release from Novell provides details about more sophisticated encryption in ZENWorks.

ovell today announced the availability of ZENworks(R) Endpoint Security Management with expanded encryption functionality and local language support. This policy-based security solution offers improved encryption for personal data management, removable storage and white-listed devices, as well as increased security for fixed disks. With ZENworks Endpoint Security Management, enterprise customers have granular control over their endpoint ports and devices allowing them to confidently protect and secure their corporate data.

A success story involving ZENWorks is introduced by Bruce Lowry.

This new success story just up about the Municipality of the Hague is a good example. The Hague has used Novell technology for some time. It uses GroupWise for its employee email, and ZENworks to manage employee desktops.

To Lowry’s credit, from what I have been told, he is truly passionate about Free software and he even convinces members of his family to follow this route. He is one of the good people and we deeply apologise for being harsh on him sometimes.

Benchmarks and Power Management

SUSE seems very popular (almost de facto) when it comes to evaluation of processors and some other bits of hardware. This Xeon benchmark is no exception.

The benchmark was performed using 32 computers to submit 500 individual transactions to a server running Novell’s SUSE Linux, Apache2 and MySQL. The firm said the test has a complex multi-user load with a large memory footprint, a high volume of context switches, significant network traffic and substantial amounts of physical disk I/O. Servers put through the wringer used 1GB memory modules in 4, 8 and 16GB memory configurations.

SUSE was used in some recent AMD benchmarks as well. Actually, it’s worth stressing that AMD and Novell have quite a healthy relationship which involves not only CPUs, but also GPUs (drivers) and virtualisation. We covered many such stories before.

These new test results were collected with Neal Nelson’s Power Efficiency Benchmark which is a client server test where up to 500 world wide web users from 32 separate computers submit individual transactions to a server running the Apache2 web server software, the MySQL relational database and Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. The benchmark has a complex multi-user load with a large memory footprint, a high volume of context switches, significant network traffic and substantial amounts of physical disk I/O.

It is mentioned in the press that both AMD and Novell are in the Green Grid.

AMD is a board member of Green Grid. Alongside several technology giants, Novell is also a contributing member to the consortium.

Novell SA sales director Desan Naidoo says Green Grid aims to make energy-efficiency part of any company’s IT and business strategy, specifically inside the data centre. He says there are many ways to change and manage power within these environments, without having to rip-and-replace.

Efficiency has always been a strength of Linux. The same goes for AMD. There is software efficiency (utilisation of the CPU and RAM) and hardware efficiency (utilisation of the network and electricity), but there is a fuzzy relationship and intersection between these. AMD and Linux (Novell) make a good pair which suffer similar problems due to predatory and even illegal behaviour of their most dominant competitor. █

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