06.21.08
Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part II: SUSE (SLED/SLED/OES) Progress
SUSE’s advancement was perhaps somewhat overshadowed by the more important release of OpenSUSE 11.0 just a couple of days ago. Magnitude matters.
Nonetheless, a few reporters kept their eyes also on the commercial versions of SUSE and here is a story about adoption at a university
De Montfort University has chosen Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 as the foundation for its IT infrastructure for students and staff. The Novell system, built on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SP1 operating system, is designed to reduce storage costs, and using Novell’s Xen virtualisation technology, improve resilience and flexibility.
The university is one of the largest in the UK, with more than 20,000 students and 3,000 staff across two campuses in Leicester, and offers 400 undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
OES2 is based on Linux and here is a firm that claims to be cannibalising Netware for OES.
SEP Software LLC., the technology leader in cross-platform data backup, data restore and disaster recovery, today announces the release of the newest version of their award winning backup software SEP sesam 3.4. The newest release allows the simple conversion from Novell Netware to the newest available version of Novell OES2. With no mess and no tools, all user rights can be transferred without issue. SEP sesam gives the Netware user community a free migration tool that is one of the easiest, safest, fastest, and most effective conversions from Netware to Linux ever invented.
An article with a juvenile headline over at iTWire talks about SUSE in supercomputers, but it gets it wrong.
Already announced, the new winner is IBM’s RoadRunner – the first supercomputer to break the ‘mythical’ 1 TFop/s barrier. At a recent benchmark, it achieved 1.026 TFop/s on the Linpack benchmark. The OS is yet to be confirmed, but pretty-much every other IBM computer in the list is running a version of SUSE. I’ll be guessing much the same as you!
It’s actually Red Hat that runs on RoadRunner (made official on Wednesday). We wrote about this several days ago. Novell knowingly deceived journalists.
A couple of press releases about MSI’s use of SLED on some laptops made an appearance very recently. Here is the first one
In order to meet increasing global customer demand for Linux* on client systems, Novell(R) today announced that Micro-Star International (MSI), a leading manufacturer of computer hardware products and solutions based in Taiwan, is pre-installing SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on MSI’s low-cost mini-notebooks.
Here is another one
Novell has announced that Micro-Star International, a manufacturer of computer hardware products and solutions based in Taiwan, is pre-installing SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on MSI’s low-cost mini-notebooks.
That’s all for SUSE — at least for now. █
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.