Novell's annual
Brainshare user conference is taking place this
week in Salt Lake City from 18 to 23 March. The software supplier
is expected to publicise its technology sharing agreement with
Microsoft and outline major product updates.
The big product news will be Open Enterprise Server 2, the
supplier's latest Linux-based application platform, which uses Xen
virtualisation technology, according to John Dragoon, Novell's
chief marketing officer. Novell will also describe the migration
path for Netware users moving to Open Enterprise.
Jeff Jaffe, Novell's chief technology officer, added that the
Microsoft and Novell Windows/Linux interoperability agreement was
also big news, with the two suppliers now working on the technical
details.
He said that they were currently focusing on side-by-side
interoperability tests and the use of virtualisation technology to
facilitate interoperability.
Alongside this, Novell and Microsoft are currently developing
management tools that can manage both suppliers' architectures in a
uniform way.
Separately, Novell has announced a new user. EBS Building
Society in Ireland has deployed Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise
Server in its mainframe environment to host IBM's Websphere
applications.
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server will support more than 1,000 users
within EBS, which has branches throughout Ireland.
"Our goal was to reduce the number of platforms and operating
systems deployed across our IT infrastructure," said Paul Nicholls,
enterprise systems manager at EBS.
"SuSE Linux provides us with a single operating system that runs
on an IBM mainframe as well as our Intel servers."
He added that SuSE Linux Enterprise Server also provided
centralised management.
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