To Novell's credit, as we mentioned earlier in the week, it's doing some advocacy in Australia trying to rid CIOs of misconceptions about open source software in general. Here is an article which contains Novell's rebuttal to accusations about poor (or lack of) open source support.

The problem with open source software is a lack of understanding, not a lack of support, according to a Novell executive who hit back at the CIOs from some of Australia's top government agencies.

In the following article, the choice of SUSE Linux at Baldor Electric is explained. It replaces mainly Windows servers but some UNIX ones also. The picture above is of Ken and Dennis (of UNIX fame) in case you wonder

Adding to the workload burden, some application servers ran on one of 20 Windows servers, while others ran on one of nine Unix servers.

[...]

The SUSE/IBM conversion was so successful that it captured management's attention. "Our CEO does not know or want to know that we are using SUSE Linux," Shackelford said. "He is interested in driving business value. We have delivered a highly available system that delivers business value at reduced cost, and that is what is important to our shareholders."

Siemens made a similar migration from UNIX to SUSE Linux but at a much large scale.

Siemens' IT services arm will use SUSE Linux over Unix as the de facto operating system for running 350 business-critical SAP systems and 120,000 user accounts - along with numerous web applications, web servers and Oracle database servers.

Linux certifications seem to be getting hot nowadays, but as it turns out, vendor-neutral ones are good also. This means that staff employed by the businesses above could cope well with Debian and Red Hat, for example. Novell is hopefully building no walls (lock-in), either practical or legal.

The LPI certification, unlike the Red Hat and Novell certifications, is vendor-neutral. The long-delayed, top-level LPIC-3 arrived in 2007.

To obtain this certification, roughly equivalent to the RHCE or the NCLE (Novell Certified Linux Engineer), a Linux administrator must have already achieved the LPIC-1 and LPIC-2 certifications.

Virtualisation

Novell paid in cash for PlateSpin and the Covington Group seems jubilant enough to make an announcement.

Covington Group of Funds ("Covington") is pleased to announce that Novell, Inc. ("Novell") has completed its acquisition of Covington investee PlateSpin Ltd. (the "Company"). The acquisition for USD$205 million (all cash transaction) will see PlateSpin's customers benefit from the larger resources and global reach provided by the amalgamation of the two entities.

This transaction has also been formally approved.

Novell Inc. said Monday it has completed acquisition of PlateSpin Ltd., whose products are expected to allow Novell customers to use their computer systems more efficiently with a greater variety of applications.

There are two new stories about virtualisation where Novell is involved. The first one is said to be "a Virtual Iron success story."

One of the challenges has been the growth in the number of servers required. Each high school has one Novell Netware workgroup server and six Windows 2003 Enterprise R2 Terminal Servers. Each junior high school has one Netware and four Windows 2003 Terminal Servers. Each elementary school has one Netware and one to two Windows 2003 Terminal Servers.

The second story is related to an announcement which was made at BrainShare 2008. Novell got together with Sesame Street, which now claims savings from virtualisation.

Broadwater recently faced a budget crunch at the same time he needed new Web servers and was physically running out of room in his data center. His solution: new HP blade servers based on Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise server software, which builds in Xen's virtualization software (Xen is the leading open source alternative to VMware's offering.)

The next (and last) post of this kind is a potpourri of news about Novell. As always, we encourage to those not interested in the Saturday posting to filter out items with "Do-No-Evil Saturday" in the title. The site maintains its focus on Novell, but weekly news became to be slightly more dull and far less analytical. ⬆