A WIDE variety of "Enterprise" releases from Novell have received some coverage over the past week.

SLEPS

Sherwin-Williams becomes a big client of Novell after the fall of Circuit City, which was a big Novell/SUSE client.

Novell today announced that the nation's largest specialty retailer of paint, stains, coatings, wall coverings and sundry items will be standardizing on SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Point of Service (POS) as the operating system for its retail store multi-function desktop/registers and in-store servers. As a global retailer of some of the most popular paint brands, Sherwin-Williams has more than 3,000 retail stores in 50 states, Canada and Latin America. SUSE Linux Enterprise POS will provide the paint retailer with a secure, cost-effective and reliable operating system.

Henry and the guys at LinuxDevices covered this as well.

Paint retail giant Sherwin-Williams announced it will standardize on Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service (SLEPS) for its multi-function desktop registers and in-store servers. More than 3,000 retail stores will install systems running the Linux distribution, which is optimized for point of sale/service (POS) operations, say the companies.

SLED

While it's Ubuntu that is commonly mentioned in IBM's latest push on the desktop, Novell is not left out in the cold... not just yet anyway.

In August, IBM said it had reconfigured its Lotus productivity and collaboration software so it would be easier to bundle with Linux distributions like Red Hat, Ubuntu and Novell Inc.'s SUSE Linux.

SLES

The following is something that we covered last week. It's about supercomputing (the very high end).

Novell today announced that the New Zealand Supercomputing Centre (NZSC) has chosen one of its PlateSpin€® workload management products to automate the management of its on-demand computing infrastructure. Together with partner InterGrid, the NZSC hosts high-intensity computing projects for oil companies, bio-pharmaceutical enterprises, movie production houses and universities.

Lenovo

Further on the subject of SLES, Lenovo has a word to share about ThinkServers running SUSE.

Jason Tan, Lenovo's Server Product manager for Asia-Pacific and Japan, said ThinkServer line is available with Microsoft Windows Server or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell.

"With ThinkServer, Lenovo delivers exceptionally engineered hardware and easy-to-use software all developed specifically for the SMB customer," said Vicky Agorilla, country general manager of Lenovo Philippines.

This is also covered here.

OES

This was the only major new announcement. Here is the press release:

Novell today announced the availability of Novell(R) Open Enterprise Server 2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) (http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver) with Domain Services for Windows*, a feature that enables seamless integration with Microsoft* Active Directory*. For the first time, customers can use Novell Open Enterprise Server to manage users and group policies through the Microsoft Management Console, thus simplifying administration, reducing costs, and leveraging their existing investment in Novell technology.

This appears also here in Trading Markets and followed by an actual report.

Novell Inc (Nasdaq:NOVL), a US IT technology company, announced on 3 December that its Open Enterprise Server Pack 1 (SP1) is now available.

From LinuxPlanet, which is now edited by Carla:

To understand the "what" of Novell's Open Enterprise Server (OES) you first have to understand the "why". Novell NetWare turned 25 this year and still has a significant number of users. Its success was largely based on doing a few things well-- file and print sharing. Other capabilities were added over the years, not the least of which was Novell Directory Services (NDS) with the introduction of NetWare 4 in 1993.

[...]

OES SP1 represents the first time that NetWare users dependent on AFP and CIFS have a viable option for migrating to Linux. It also provides more user-friendly tools for migrating complex enterprise installations. If you still have NetWare servers in your environment, you'll want to take a hard look at this release of OES as a way out.

SLES 10 includes Xen virtualization, and Novell fully supports running virtualized NetWare on a Linux box if you must keep a NetWare server around. 'Server consolidation has proven to save money, both on installation and operation costs. Novell hopes their NetWare customers will choose to stick with the company and switch to the Linux platform as a long-term solution.

Turbolinux

Now much here apart from articles in foreign languages and some security advisories. ⬆