Suse Linux Enterprise 11 – Lean, Mean and Green!

By David Heath
Wednesday, 19 March 2008 17:25

Market

Novell announces development plans for the next generation of Suse Linux, promising mission-critical abilities in a power-friendly package.

Since purchasing Suse Linux from its German parent in 2004, Novell has engineered an amazing turn-around in its business model.  Prior to 2004, the world expected this proprietary networking company to slowly evolve its flagship NetWare product and equally slowly disappear into the murk of Microsoft’s marketing might.

Since taking the red pill (if you were at BrainShare in 2000, you’d understand), Suse has subverted the swallower and eventually become the product; the avowed future of Novell.  Not bad for a supposedly free product.

Initially releasing a range of versions 9 in 2004 and 2005, Novell started to understand Suse and look to how it might form a foundation to the future.  They even forked their flagship product, offering a choice of either a Netware Core Protocol (NCP) or Suse-derived kernel to underpin Novell Enterprise Server.  In hindsight, the evolution of IPX/SPX to TCP/IP in NetWare v5.0 should have offered a clue.

In the past couple of years, Novell has extended and diverged Suse (and the core networking services) to version 10 with separate server and workstation products.

With last year’s alliance with Microsoft, one had the feeling that the red pill was slowly tinging purple (Sam Varghese [of this site] and Miguel de Icaza having an interesting spat via the blogs on the topic).

Now comes the future.  With the announcement of Suse Version 11 Novell is making it very clear that, as far as they are concerned, the future of the enterprise is Linux.  The press release from BrainShare (currently in session in Salt Lake City) shows that Novell is clearly focussing on the enterprise, highlighting Mission-critical data centre technologies, UNIX migration, Virtualization, Interoperability, Green IT (through enhanced support for power reduction technologies) and Desktop Linux Innovation as the core improvements in v11.

Novell always understood the core IT needs of the enterprise, seems they are yet again (vale Word perfect) setting their sights on the desktop.