Eventful lizard

FOR SUSE, unlike OpenSUSE, this has been an events-packed week. Here is a quick rundown.

SLES

Rodney Gedda reports from Australia, claiming that a fire brigade has adopted SLES. Gedda himself is (or was) a SLED user.

The NSW Fire Brigades' has adopted virtualisation for its new disaster recovery strategy and in the process moved its core services from Windows to SUSE Linux.

NSW Fire Brigades’ IT infrastructure operations manager, Matthew Robey, said with 60 physical servers in a single production data centre there were increasing server costs, no more “real estate” to accommodate servers and a limited DR capacity.

“We consolidated servers using Oracle RAC and VMware, and moved from Windows to SLES 10,” Robey said.

Servicing more than 140,000 incidents per year, NSW Fire Brigades is a $500 million a year organisation with 7000 employees, 340 fire stations and some 900 fire trucks. To improve its level of DR, Fire Brigades built a new production data centre and used its existing Sydney city data centre as the DR site.

Matt Asay offers a glimpse at this current discussion about Novell's mixture of its past and future (SUSE) business.

NetworkWorld nails it with an article describing how proprietary licensing encourages companies to spend time protecting their past investments, rather than focusing on the future. While the article deals with Microsoft's ongoing legal battles with Novell over WordPerfect (Remember that?),

[...]

Red Hat and other open-source companies, in other words, are focused on the future, because that's what their model requires in order to earn renewals from customers.

SplendidCRM clearly seems like a lover of Mono, being the .NET-oriented company which it is. It's likely that some of its deployments are set up on SLES.

This release takes advantage of a number of advances in Mono, including support for Master Pages and AJAX. “We are grateful to Novell and the Mono team as they make it incredibly easy to create a cross-platform application using Microsoft .NET and C#,” said Mr. Rony.

Jason Perlow (of IBM) has apparently pressured Novell regarding SLES and OpenSUSE.

Look, I like openSUSE. A lot. I fought to get SuSE Linux Professional released into Open Source when the idea wasn’t even a twinkle in Novell’s eye. I run openSUSE on several of my personal systems, and I have it virtualized up the ying-yang on VMWare ESX 3i. And while openSUSE is stable, it’s not optimized for server use, it’s more of a end-user/developer OS, even though it could be “purposed” as a server and I frequently do this myself. However, openSUSE’s 2-year support cycle makes it viable as a server only for the most agile software development shops.

IBM's support of SLES is confirmed on POWER 6 servers, which still seem to be virtualising GNU/Linux under UNIX.

The Power systems, including the model 560 and the JS21 blades, can run IBM AIX, IBM i (formerly i5/OS and before that OS/400) or Linux. Specifically, they support AIX 5.2 up to the latest 6.1, IBM i from 5.4 up to the latest 6.1, and two Linux distributions: Novell SLES 10 SP1 or higher, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5 upwards.

ITJungle has some more information about it.

The machine supports AIX 5.3 or 6.1, i 6.1 (but not i5/OS V5R4, which is supported on other Power6-based rack machinery), and Linux with the 2.6 kernel (Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SP1 and SP2 and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 4.5 or later and 5.1 or later releases are certified on the machine).

Here's a little gem about Teradata and SUSE. Teradata was mentioned a few times last month.

The Teradata Extreme Data Appliance, based on the field proven Teradata platform technologies, is an affordable, fully integrated, scalable platform with the quad-core Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor, industry standard high capacity storage, running on Novell(R) SUSE(R) Linux, and the marketing-leading Teradata 12 database and utilities. All components are pre-installed and the appliance is currently available.

SLED

SJVN is still a fan of SUSE on the desktop, despite his frustration about Novell's patent deal with Microsoft.

My answer is that those requirements pretty much narrow it down to Novell and SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop). Novell, and its resellers, knows support and SMB.

The following article about OpenOffice.org 3.0 offers some special treatment to Novell and SUSE.

"For 95 percent of the users out there, we believe OpenOffice.org can fully replace Microsoft Office," Grant Ho, senior product marketing manager of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, told InternetNews.com. Novell is a major contributor to OOo and includes the office suite as part of its SUSE Linux distributions.

Here are some SUSE revenue figures.

For those wondering how big Red Hat and Novell can become on operating-system revenue alone, keep that $61 billion number in mind. Most of that $61 billion is hardware-related, but it meant approximately $650 million in Linux server sales for Red Hat and Novell over the past year. As Linux eats into Unix, Red Hat and Novell can expect to grow linearly with it.

Novell's business, and particularly its revenue, are still barely touched or affected by the SUSE component, which probably accounts for less than 10%, depending on the criterion one chooses for measuring it.

Sub-notebooks

Another new sub-notebook called "PicoBook" hits the market and it comes with SUSE.

It also has an in-built webcam and a 4-in-1 card reader. The machine will come in two versions, one sporting the traditional Windows XP Home (the OS that refuses to die!) and also one with user-friendly Suse Linux. While the Linux one cost €£279, the XP version costs extra.

There is still some chatter about that IDG article which was mentioned last week. It was about SUSE and sub-notebooks. Here is some more commentary about it:

Use of open source OS in 'web-devices' is increasing exposure to alternatives to Windows claims Novell

OES2

Open Enterprise Server 2 SP1 is now a public beta.

Novell today announced the public beta of Open Enterprise Server 2 with Service Pack 1 (SP1), which brings interoperability between Linux, Windows, Macintosh and NetWare to the next level. Built on the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform, Open Enterprise Server 2 is the only secure, reliable and scalable alternative to Microsoft that is backed by the best services and support of any commercial Linux distribution on the market.

Here is some more information:

Novell, a company offering Linux based virtualisation products, today (15 October) announced the public beta version of its Open Enterprise Server 2 with Service Pack 1.

The press from the east covered this as well.

Novell today announced the public beta of Open Enterprise Server 2 with Service Pack 1 (SP1), which brings interoperability between Linux, Windows, Macintosh, and NetWare to the next level.

OES2 is based on SUSE. ⬆