The Novell way

The products and solutions offered by Novell provide an open enterprise platform that takes care of an enterprise’s needs from the desktop to the data-centre.

Amit Nagar of Novell

Today, CIOs and IT executives face various challenges. The three-fold challenges include cost, complexity and risk. All the points and challenges faced make us wonder if an open standard-based solution can help enterprises across verticals. These are the challenges that hit daily operational processes. It is a well-known fact that industry offers open standard-based solutions to offer better ROI. The product and solutions offered by Novell offers an open enterprise platform from desktop to data-centre needs. The product line includes the following.

SUSE Linux Enterprise desktop

SUSE Linux Enterprise desktop comes with Novell support from the Novell Customer Centre. The OS comes integrated with OpenOffice.org 2.0, the Novell edition, which is a complete office suite. It is compatible with standard file formats, including those of Microsoft, Sun and OpenDocument (open source file format from OASIS). OpenOffice 2.0 also includes native support for Visual Basic macros.

Novell strengthens Linux further by including the AppArmor application-security solution as part of SUSE Linux Enterprise desktop.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service

Novell Linux Point of Service 9 is the premier Linux platform optimised for the enterprise retail point-of-sale environment. It includes Linux for user touch-points and in-store servers. It is aimed at helping retailers reduce their total cost of ownership through centralised administration and deployment tools, and small operating-system footprint images.

Open enterprise server

Novell’s OES 1.0 is one of the most notable for the range of options it offers companies, particularly those now running NetWare. OES can be backed by the SUSE Linux or NetWare platforms, and provides a solid route for enterprises looking to mix these platforms or migrate between them. Further, OES provides for synchronisation with or migration from Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

One of the needs in today’s enterprise needs is Virtualisation. It is almost as old as enterprise computing itself, and today, it is a hot topic more so when it comes to the datacentre needs. This is because several emerging virtualisation technologies have the potential to improve to resource utilisation, efficiency, scalability and manageability. One of those technologies is the Xen hypervisor open source project, for which Novell offers full support. Novell and its partners have proved the stability of Xen through thousands of hours of quality assurance testing prior to its official release in July 2006.