SCA_SLES15 test - SCA in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 Updated: 2024

Linux

The scrappy operating system company, which stormed the Linux and open-source scene with its buyout of SUSE Linux two years ago, delivered a challenge to the XChange Tech Connect audience last week in Las Vegas: Take a risk and offer your customers another choice in operating systems.

"Don't slip into comfortable inaction," said Ladd Timpson, global director of channel and partner marketing at Novell, during his keynote session.

Several market factors are playing to Novell's message, he said, including new licensing and support models, the urgent need for secure computing environments, the reality of heterogeneity and the ongoing need to cut costs.

The Waltham, Mass.-based software company also used XChange to deliver a special sneak preview of its updated and upcoming Linux desktop to attendees, in both its keynote and a packed-to-the-gills demonstration room.

"We're pushing to make that the No. 1 [Linux] distribution, of course. But Novell is not just a Linux company," Timpson said, touting Novell's positions in identity and resource management, and the data center.

Novell Senior Engineer Peter Bowen tested the beta edition of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, showcasing, among other things, its support for pulling in Visual Basic scripts as well as Active Directory synchronization and full NetWare integration.

Novell executives freely admit that this product is not for the desktop power user who uses every single Excel feature, but the company is positioning its offering as a viable alternative for fixed-function, transactional or technical workstations as well as basic desktops.

The software's integrated "application browser" feature drew nods of approval from the audience. The technology intuitively figures out what application needs to be launched based on word(s) typed into the search query. For desktop searches, queries pull up pertinent results across multiple applications including documents, instant messages, e-mail (including attachments) and Web browsers.

Bowen also demonstrated the ability to toggle quickly between multiple applications, presenting the user with an active thumbnail view. Users can even flip between desktop views on more than one dimension, a feature that might appeal to system builders that want to place machines in multiuser settings.

Novell's Timpson did not provide pricing details for the forthcoming update, which is due in July, but the current price tag for the Novell Linux Desktop, powered by the SUSE Linux kernel, is $50.

"I don't think we believe in any way that we're going to displace Microsoft," Timpson said in a separate interview before the presentation. "But this gives [solution providers and system builders] a way to reduce their costs and increase their profitability."

During an XChange panel discussion following Novell's presentation, Gary Clayton, vice president of Entre Technology Group, a Fort Worth, Texas-based system builder that provides highly-specialized embedded systems for the medical market, urged system builders to consider a Linux alternative.

"On a $500 to $700 desktop PC, the Microsoft license is your single largest cost, so why not consider the Linux desktop, if it is a lower cost?" Clayton said. "Bring it out therewhen [Microsoft] sees their largest contingency is starting to adopt a platform from another manufacturer we just might get their attention."

Several system builders attending the session said they will seriously look at Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 because of their frustration with Microsoft and its pricing.

David Lair, owner of Lair Services, a Brandon, Fla., Microsoft partner, said he is anxious to evaluate SUSE Linux Enterprise 10. "I am going to put it on a couple of test boxes," he said. "The last time I looked at Novell was 1996. Now they are doing this. If they can get this out before Christmas, Microsoft is going to lose a whole lot of their steam with Vista."

Don Allison, owner of Media2Play, a Tuscon, Ariz.-based system builder, said the marketplace now is more receptive to a Linux alternative. "The whole market has changed radically in the last couple of years," he said. "The hardware margins have slimmed down. Open source is coming into its own. People are looking for alternatives."

Some system builders, however, said although they are frustrated by Microsoft's near monopoly-like position on the desktop, they would be hard-pressed to switch to Linux.

Robert Nitrio, president of Ranvest Associates, a Microsoft solution provider in Orangeville, Calif., said there is a big "inertia" factor with Linux. "That is the key element," he said. "I will definitely take a look at SUSE Linux, but as much as I might like it, I still have to go back to my clients and look at the total return on investment of the proposition. You have to make hardware changes, code changes and then bring in new software that runs on the Linux platform ... and get them up and running. There are costs there."

I wrote a previous Geek Guide, titled Ceph: Open-Source SDS, that briefly introduced a Ceph-based, data storage management system called SUSE Enterprise Storage. Based on the response from readers of that ebook and given exact advancements in the maturity of SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES), it seemed logical to explore some of the features of SES more closely.

In this ebook, I review the characteristics of software-defined storage, along with its business benefits. Then, I explore the features of SUSE Enterprise Storage and how those capabilities can really help your organization leverage the benefits of open-source software-defined storage (SDS).

Red Hat caused some trouble in the open-source community at the end of June when they announced that the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) would no longer be publicly available and could only be accessed by its customers

A couple of weeks later, the open-source software company SUSE said it would create a fork of RHEL and maintain a distribution for it. 

Now SUSE is announcing it has joined forces with CIQ and Oracle to form the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA). This new group will help “encourage the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free Enterprise Linux (EL) source code.”

OpenELA will provide all the sources that are needed for RHEL downstreams to exist. Their initial focus will be on RHEL EL8 and EL9, and they are also considering EL7. 

Their core tenets include full compliance with the existing standard, timely updates and fixes, transparency, community, and ensuring that RHEL remains free and redistributable. 

“Many large organizations reached out to us to express the importance of community-driven source code for EL that can act as a starting point for compatible distributions,” said Wim Coekaerts, head of Oracle Linux development at Oracle. “OpenELA is our response to this need, and it represents a commitment to helping the open-source community continue to develop compatible EL distributions.”

Open-source company SUSE has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Rancher Labs. According to SUSE, it wants to use the acquisition to establish the companies as the main open source innovators for Enterprise Linux, Kubernetes, edge computing and AI.

“By combining Rancher and SUSE, we not only gain massive engineering resources to further strengthen our market-leading product, we are also able to preserve our unique 100% open source business model,” said Sheng Liang, the CEO of Rancher. “SUSE’s strong ecosystem will greatly accelerate Rancher’s on-going efforts to transform how organizations adopt cloud native technology.”

Rancher Labs offers a enterprise Kubernetes management platform that addresses the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters, while providing DevOps teams with integrated tools for running containerized workloads.

And the trend for Kubernetes management platforms is only growing, the company explained. 

Gartner predicts that growing adoption of cloud-native applications and infrastructure will increase use of container management to over 75% of large enterprises in mature economies by 2024 (up from less than 35% in 2020).

With the acquisition, SUSE also wants to help IT and operations leaders meet the needs of their customers at any stage of their digital transformation – whether that’s from the data center to the cloud of the edge, SUSE stated in a post.

The company went on to explained that SUSE customers will benefit from Rancher’s cloud-native technologies, while Rancher’s customers will gain access to SUSE’s global support network and open-source portfolio.  

SUSE also stated that it is firmly committed to delivering fully open-source technologies with no vendor lock-in, and Rancher will continue its open strategy and support multiple Kubernetes distributions and operating systems. 

“This is an incredible moment for our industry, as two open source leaders are joining forces. The merger of a leader in Enterprise Linux, Edge Computing and AI with a leader in Enterprise Kubernetes Management will disrupt the market to help customers accelerate their digital transformation journeys,” said Melissa Di Donato, the CEO of SUSE.

The deal is expected to close before the end of October 2020. 

Linux

However, it is unclear whether the UnitedLinux will translate into real money-making market opportunities for channel.

At the Las Vegas show on Tuesday, the UnitedLinux organization will unveil the completion of its first enterprise-class uniform Linux distribution. The SCO Group, formerly Caldera Systems, will launch SCO Linux Server 4.0, while German Linux giant SuSE will launch SuSE Linux Enterprise 8 Server. The UnitedLinux launch is being sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

Both companies are targeting their United Linux distributions to compete more effectively against leading Linux software vendor Red Hat, but they also are focusing on different customer segments: The SCO Group is aiming at the SMB market, while SuSE is targeting enterprise customers and resellers.

Last May, SCO and SuSe joined with other Linux underdogs TurboLinux and Conectiva to create a new Linux organization called UnitedLinux, whose mission was to create a uniform Linux distribution that would enable them to compete as one against leader Red Hat and get more ISV support.

IBM, for example, plans to support UnitedLinux across its entire software portfolio for Linux with more than 65 products, including WebSphere, DB2, Lotus and Tivoli offerings.

Taking a page from Red Hat's playbook, UnitedLinux will supply business customers a commercial-grade OS, a broader portfolio of applications, stronger branding and better support. The alliance also hopes to tap into a resource Red Hat lacks: a strong channel base.

Red Hat, whose business model has historically been viewed as channel unfriendly, only recently signed its first reselling deal, with IBM Global Services. In contrast, UnitedLinux vendors have thousands of partners worldwide.

Some view the UnitedLinux alliance as a desperate attempt to prevent the same kind of fragmentation that splintered the Unix world and block Red Hat--already the market leader with more than 50 percent share of the server market--from becoming the Microsoft of the Linux world.

But UnitedLinux has an advantage today: It debuts at a time when the channel is increasingly viewed as a more viable model for driving Linux business. In exact months, for example, traditional services-oriented Red Hat has reversed course and sculpted a new business model based on driving the "majority" of its services business through the channel, while reaping revenue from its server software, Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik told CRN recently.

Whether or not UnitedLinux will get better traction because of its stronger channel base is unclear, but some observers say it has an advantage, given Red Hat's poor channel relations to date.

Mark Hatch, COO of Integrated Computer Solutions (ICS), Cambridge, Mass., a Unix ISV and consulting firm that lists Disney, Lockheed, Citibank and Southwest Airlines as clients, said, "By creating a single, compatible distribution that combines the customer bases of SuSE, TurboLinux and SCO, ICS can serve more customers with a single product distribution.

"Prior to UnitedLinux, it was uneconomical for ICS to support [SCO OpenLinux and many of the other smaller Linux distributions because subtle incompatibilities required separate products with their own release engineering," said Hatch. "I think the combination of the market share of SuSE and Turbo, with the traditional distribution strengths of SCO, will make this a two-horse race. SCO understands the value of partners of all sizes, something that Red Hat has yet to learn."

SCO executives expect its UnitedLinux distribution also will be more appealing to channel partners and customers because of the wider breadth globally and the availability of business applications. UnitedLinux partner TurboLinux has a wide reach in Japan and the Pacific Rim, SuSE rules in Europe and Conectiva has a stronghold in South America.

SCO Linux Server 4.0, unveiled on Tuesday in four editions, is a significant change from the company's existing OpenLinux server and offers enterprise-class features, including eight-node clustering and large memory support (4 Gbytes). SCO has a base of 16,000 resellers--mostly Unix focused--and will market a low-end edition for resellers priced at $599, as well as classic, business and enterprise editions to scale up for different customer needs.

"Version 4.0 is an entirely new animal," said Chris Sontag, senior vice president of The SCO Group's operating systems division, noting the company will offer migration tools to enable partners to upgrade customers from the company's previous OpenLinux platform to SCO Linux Server. "It's a best-of-class enterprise server product, but we're focused on small to medium-size businesses and will focus our solutions to their requirements."

Since its inception as Caldera in 1994, the Lindon, Utah-based company has faced significant marketing challenges against Red Hat. While establishing itself early as a channel-friendly Linux company, Caldera failed to make significant inroads while rival Red Hat took off on Wall Street and in market circles. Caldera made several steps to boost its presence, including changing executive leadership and acquiring the Unix business and substantial channel assets of the former Santa Cruz Organization in 2001. Nevertheless, it continued to face an uphill battle. Last August, the company discarded the legacy Caldera branding and took on the more recognizable SCO branding.

One SCO Group channel partner said he believes the latest UnitedLinux marketing efforts and availability of more business applications for SCO Linux Server 4.0 will finally make SCO's Linux more competitive against Red Hat and others.

"This release offers a convention of players rallying on the same distribution. With the power of these companies, Linux will have a united front and united backing by those that create software to run on it," said Mark Robinson, CFO of Auto Rain Data Systems, a SCO-authorized partner in Spokane, Wash. "More products will be able to be built for this group than was ever possible with split distributions, since the developers can [now test once for distributing to the many."

Another significant UnitedLinux launch at Comdex this week is SuSE's Linux Enterprise 8. The German-based company's first UnitedLinux distribution--which competes with Red Hat Advanced Server--will begin shipping on Nov. 25, said Holger Dyroff, head of U.S. operations for SuSE.

The company, which has a U.S. office in Oakland, Calif., markets the cross-platform benefits and enterprise-class features of its existing Enterprise 7 Server, but will push added platform and UnitedLinux support in Version 8.0. SuSE Enterprise 8 runs on Intel and x86, Itanium and IBM's iSeries, pSeries and zSeries mainframes. SuSE has attempted to attract U.S. partners in the past year and lists IBM Global Services as well as high-end IBM business partners Sirius and Mainline Information Systems among its partners to date.

SuSE has a major alliance with IBM Global Services and will also announce on Wednesday a major distribution agreement with Arrow Electronics, Dyroff told CRN. "We have a distribution agreement with Arrow and will offer two products for the channel, including a package available much cheaper for internal use," said the SuSE executive. The Enterprise 8 Server, for example, will be available for about $150 for internal reseller use and $350 for customer pilots.

SuSE's UnitedLinux distribution will be a good product for channel partners because it has cross-platform support across all Intel and IBM platforms, more ISV interest, enterprise-class features that rival those of Red Hat Advanced Server, international coverage and better options for channel partners, said SuSE partners.

"What we feared is that Linux would go the way of Unix and each vendor would have its own variant and there would be incompatibilities. UnitedLinux addresses that and creates a standard," said Jimmy Lee, director of emerging technologies at Mainline Information Systems. "It'll take a period of time, but it will work."

Lee also maintains that UnitedLinux is destined to get more channel support because Red Hat has not been channel friendly. The reseller unveiled partnerships with TurboLinux and SuSE but was unable to negotiate a reselling deal with Red Hat over the past year.

"I don't believe in arrogance," said Lee, claiming that Red Hat did its deal with IBM Global Services and told his company they'd come calling after they established an SMB channel program. "Red Hat called back two months ago and we said, 'No thank you.' We walked away."

Observers remain unclear about the potential success for UnitedLinux--and Red Hat Linux--in the channel. While Red Hat continues developing a new SMB channel program it intends to launch within the next few months, UnitedLinux members will be able to tap into one another's existing channel assets to land more channel and distribution deals. However, it will continue to face off against Red Hat's strong brand identity as well as Microsoft's commanding lead in the channel for client and server operating systems, observers maintain.

Yet at least one purist in the open-source world claims the business models of Red Hat and UnitedLinux ultimately won't work because they cling to the more traditional, proprietary method of doing business.

"Basically, UnitedLinux is an attempt to share the costs of maintaining a core Linux distribution between different companies. It's an interesting idea, but I don't think its workable as planned because they are not inviting participation of the Linux community or Linux businesses by allowing people and companies to contribute to the core packaging effort," said Anthony Awtrey, vice president-director of integration for Linux solution provider Ideal Technology, which favors the Debian Linux distribution.

"UnitedLinux has no plan to engage other companies or development groups without those groups paying to participate," said Awtrey. "Therefore, if Oracle or some small SCO reseller wants their application to be certified for UnitedLinux, they must pay for it. There is no way to create the perceived value of the certification to justify the cost to participants.

"I can't see UnitedLinux ever winning out."

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Okay, maybe I’m approaching this from a position of privilege.

One of my earliest memories is of tagging along to my mother’s former grammar school when she voted. Social Studies was one of my favorite elementary school classes. Mr. Lowry’s junior high Civics class taught us about polling, current events and debate skills. I made straight A’s when I minored in Political Science in college.

So I’m a wee bit prejudiced when I applaud the arrival of the book “Restoring the City on a Hill: U.S. History & Civics in America’s Schools.”

The authors recommend a rebooted K-12 emphasis on the documents, historical figures, Supreme Court cases, core principles and sacred duties that used to bring us together as Americans.

(To their credit, the authors avoid divisiveness by relegating the easily misinterpreted phrase “dumb as a sack of wet rocks” to the appendix of a future edition.)

At least 9 out of 10 applicants for legal immigration routinely pass a rigorous citizenship test, but an alarmingly high percentage of native-born Americans experience difficulty listing the three branches of government (“Lather, rinse, repeat?”) or remembering the name of their state legislator. (“My letter to Mr. Free Beans and Barbecue got returned by the United States Postal Service, which I believe was founded as part of the space shuttle program!”)

We were more knowledgeable back in my day, but even then, civic awareness was on a downhill slide. It was a matter of priorities; many of my peers would’ve loved practicing “The Federalist Papers,” but first they had to score some Zig-Zag papers.

Many school districts don’t really offer old-fashioned Civics instruction anymore, unless you count endless school-spirit “dress-up” days where students poke around in their parents’ closet and ask what happened to the powdered wigs they wore in school.

If we’re to find solutions to our apathy and ignorance, we have to ask ourselves if we’re part of the problem.

If you think that “the right to assemble” was put into the Bill of Rights because of bribes from IKEA …

If you think that “bicameral” has something to do with the spectrum of confections …

If you think the Electoral College should let its athletes profit from merchandising …

If you think the inscription beneath the Statue of Liberty says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses … we’ll leave a light on for you” …

If you think that “civic engagement” is a step toward marrying your Honda …

… you just might need to get a refresher course.

If our graduates are going to maximize their performance in the Real World and serve as an inspiration for newly minted citizens, they need at least a working knowledge of eminent domain, filibusters, jury duty, petitions, referendums, trade deficits and the causes of inflation.

But let’s strive for neutrality. Some schools that do provide Civics courses encourage the teachers to use them as training grounds for misguided activism. (“Today we’re going to protest the inequity of the summer solstice. Everyone glue your hands to the sun. Ouch! Owie!”)

Yes, some educators yearn to indoctrinate their students into dissing our traditions and institutions. On the plus side, at least this uncovers other inadequacies.

“I’m not standing for the National Anthem. I’m taking a … bendy thing between the upper part of your leg and the lower part of your leg.”

*Sigh*

Maybe it’s time to reevaluate biology as well.

Danny Tyree welcomes email responses at tyreetyrades@aol.com.

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Thought Leadership

Additional Resources

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Media Contact

Timothy Sar
support@testwheel.com
703-831-0705
950 Herndon Parkway, Suite 410
Herndon, VA 20170

SOURCE: TestWheel

View the original press release on accesswire.com