The final post in this series looks at some of Novell's 'lesser-Linux' news.

Virtualisation

Novell is still working with Xen, which is now controlled by another Microsoft partner, Citrix. Novell works on appliances, perhaps similarly to the Red Hat spinoff (ish) called rPath.

Novell is quietly working on a stand-alone hypervisor product that will be based on the Xen hypervisor found in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.

[...]

Novell Chief Technology Officer Jeff Jaffe hinted at a stand-alone hypervisor product during his keynote address at the BrainShare conference in March, saying one of Novell's goals was to make SLES 11 available as an appliance that would be supported by a new tool set designed to quickly build specialized images.

Identity Management and Authentication

There is a lot going on at Novell as far as identity is concerned (and not just loss of identity as a Linux vendor). Here is an announcement that involves Novacoast, a Novell partner.

Identity Engines, a leading provider of identity-based secure network access solutions, and Novacoast, Inc., an IT professional services and product development firm, today announced that Identity Engines' Ignition€® Server has successfully passed Novacoast's stringent security evaluation bench test and will be resold by Novacoast. The partnership leverages both companies' deep expertise in Novell identity and security management solutions as well as rapid deployment of role-based network access solutions for education and health care.

Watch this Novell-sponsored 'article' (commercial in the form of an article morelike) that promotes Novell products.

Novell€® identity management and access solutions give governments the agility to continue with their core functions without being confined by administrative approvals for information access or letting data fall into the wrong hands.

It is sad to see govtech.com becoming somewhat of a pamphlet.

Novell is mentioned in this article from RSA, which ought to be well over by now.

Before getting to the RSA announcements, though, I’d like to point you to a fascinating panel discussion from Novell's recent Brainshare conference. Novell and Bandit Project engineer Dale Olds, Microsoft Identity Architect Kim Cameron, Ping ID CTO Patrick Harding and the Pamela Project’s Pam Dingle all got together (guided by Carolyn Ford from Novell’s product marketing team) to discuss “Open Source and User-centric Identity in the Enterprise,” a subject near and dear to my heart. I’d remarked that I was sorry I missed the session, so Novell’s friendly flakette, Charlotte Betterley, got it posted online just so I could watch it. At least, that’s what she said. Now you can watch it too and learn how user-centric identity can play in your enterprise.

SAP

Novell's relationship with SAP gets highlighted in this article from the Australian press.

IN a move to boost the growing demand for SUSE Linux Enterprise, Novell says it has extended its partnership with SAP to offer enhanced options for customers who choose to run open source.

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As part of the initiative, SAP and Novell plan to optimise SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP's data centre infrastructure requirements and continue to promote SAP Business All-in-One systems based on SUSE Linux Enterprise.

There is a little more about this relationship in the following quote sheet

“As the first operating system to deliver support for SAP Adaptive Computing, SUSE Linux Enterprise continues to extend its leadership in mission-critical computing,” said Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and CTO at Novell. “Novell is thrilled to be a founding member of the enterprise virtualization community. By leveraging the integration of Novell ZENworks Orchestrator with the SAP Adaptive Computing Console, customers will be easily be able to reduce cost and complexity through improved management of both their physical and virtual SAP workloads.”

Mono/Mainsoft

Criticism of Mono is better off reserved for another day, but here is an article about Mainsoft's latest press release.

If that name "Mainsoft" sounds familiar, it could be for good reasons: It worked closely with Novell on its Mono open source project, which Novell originally created to offer an open source use so .NET software can run on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X along with Windows. Developers and Linux vendors increasingly want to use Microsoft software development tools in open source environments, and not surprisingly have been forced to port technologies over with very little assistance from Microsoft.

If you have any feedback on these Saturday posts (even rants to offer and share), please feel free to speak up. ⬆