Open ENterprise Server

Novell Presents New Executive Leadership Team, Returns to Utah

May 18, 2011 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Novell, a business unit of The Attachmate Group, today announced a new executive leadership team with a mission to rededicate and refocus on the end-user computing solutions used by many of Novell’s long-standing and loyal customers and partners.

Under the leadership of Bob Flynn, president and general manager of Novell, the Novell management team will continue innovating next-generation products while also nurturing the mature and widely adopted Novell solutions.

Central to the unit’s go-forward strategy to help customers maximize their investments is extending support for the NetWare product as customers upgrade to Open Enterprise Server and continuing investments in Novell GroupWise and Novell ZENworks endpoint management solutions.

The new Novell business unit will have a clear focus on the widely adopted core Novell solutions in the collaboration and endpoint management markets. This renewed focus will allow Novell to dedicate resources to meet existing and new customer requirements, where the company’s heritage and expertise is strongest.

Headquartered in Provo, Utah, the Novell leadership team comprises:

Bob Flynn – President and General Manager
Dave Wilkes – Vice President, Engineering
Eric Varness – Vice President, Product Management and Marketing
Juan Carlos Cerrutti – Vice President, North America Sales
Dirk W. Schmidt – Vice President, EMEA Sales
John Delk – Vice President, Strategic Accounts, Partners & Alliances – North America

BakBone Introduces NetVault: Backup 8.1 With Full Adoption of VMware Technology

May 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

BakBone Software has released a new version of its flagship data protection solution, NetVault: Backup 8.1, adding support for individual VMware ESX Servers as well as full virtual data centers, all integrated and managed from the NetVault: Backup GUI. Users do not need to create and run scripts, giving BakBone customers the flexibility to deploy data protection in virtual environments and manage the solution under one umbrella.

In addition to new VMware capabilities, BakBone now also provides full support for Novell‘s Open Enterprise Server (OES) 2. BakBone claims to offer the broadest Linux capabilities in the storage management market, supporting more leading Linux distributions and applications than any other data protection software vendor.

According to the press release, the highlights for NetVault: Backup 8.1 include

Full VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) Support

Offers the flexibility to protect virtual machines deployed on a VMware ESX Server or multiple VMware ESX Servers from a VCB proxy server
Provides protection for virtual machine images or individual files on Windows guest operating system without the need for complex scripting
Tracks virtual machine migration with VMotion

Full VMware virtual machine backups

Provides virtual machines with protection from disasters, media failure and data corruption
Protects the entire virtual environment in case of a disaster, including log and configuration files as well as the VMDK data files

Increased flexibility

Gives administrators automatic integration with supported devices, including a VTL, SAN, NDMP or locally attached drives
Offers greater granularity for Windows on VMware by allowing customers to backup and restore individual files within virtual machines
Empowers storage administrators to create comprehensive, flexible backup policies without the need to understand VCB internals or create complex scripts

NetVault: Backup 8.1 extends capabilities beyond the backup and recovery of virtual environments. The solution reduces the load on ESX Servers and simplifies virtual environment protection by consolidating backups through single servers. This is especially important for businesses that need to reduce data center energy demands as they consolidate hardware.

[Source: VMBlog]

Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe Outlines Technical Strategy for 2008

January 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Jeff Jaffe , Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer for Novell, published a blog post 2 days ago outlining the company’s technical strategy for 2008. This is what he had to say about its focus on virtualization:

We see agility and customer focus as key in our progress on virtualization – one of the hottest areas in the industry. In SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, we introduced open source virtualization into a commercial Linux distribution before anyone else did. Once we introduced this, we spoke to customers. We spoke to partners. We spoke to analysts. We spoke to everyone! By listening, we discovered that we had not yet nailed it. In 2007 we listened, and in a very short time we became a leader in virtualization.

Our Open Enterprise Server customers told us that they wanted NetWare virtualized on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server – to take advantage of all of the drivers provided by Linux. And it needed to perform. After all, file and storage performance for NetWare is critical. A unique partnership between our Workgroup team and our Open Platform Solutions team has resulted in virtualization capability in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 that is higher performance and more manageable than any other open source solution. This is the basis for OES 2.

We talked to other customers. They did not want virtualization as a bare technology. They wanted it to be managed. Novell quickly turned around and built technology to manage workloads and provision virtual machines. ZENworks Orchestrator. The best managed open source virtualization solution.

And we listened to customers and partners some more. They said get a tight partnership with Microsoft to optimize Windows on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Build a joint lab for testing – so customers have the confidence that our solution works best with Microsoft. We did all of that!

Here is the totality. From a barebones hypervisor in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, we now have an industrial strength hypervisor, supporting the demanding NetWare workload, optimized for Microsoft, SAP and others, with a joint lab for testing. It is manageable with ZENworks and will address low latencies.

How did we do this? We listened!

Virtualization clearly is a key topic for the industry, and with the 2007 results we have both staked a claim and demonstrated our agile processes. Look for this to continue to be an area of significant investment in 2008.