Novell Lays Out Its Plans for OES and Linux at BrainShare 2006

Published: March 21, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Novell kicked off its BrainShare 2006 customer and partner conference in Salt Lake City yesterday, and the company's top brass spent the opening keynote sessions explaining Novell's technology and business strategy, often reiterating themes we have had heard in the past several years.

Jack Messman, Novell's chairman and chief executive officer, spent time talking about the Novell's basic strategy, which is to leverage Linux and other open source software while keeping its NetWare customers happy as long as they want support for the product. In his address, he said that Novell's "open enterprise strategy" is nothing new, but rather a term that encapsulates what Novell has been doing since it acquired Ximian and Novell years ago: peddling a mix of open and closed source programs that mirror the mixed software environments out there in the real world.

While Novell clearly wants people to get excited about SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 server, which launches in May with integrated support for the Xen 3.0 hypervisor as well as more sophisticated and integrated clustering services, Novell has to be practical. That is why it launched Open Enterprise Server, the dual-kernel platform that provides Linux and NetWare services on either Linux or NetWare kernels. While Messman was not be specific about the uptake of this hybrid OES license, which is a clever way of getting NetWare customers using Linux, he did say that "thousands" of customers have moved to OES, and that about two-thirds of the deployments had chosen the Linux kernel, with the remaining third choosing the NetWare kernel. In a separate announcement that talked about the long-term plans for OES, Novell said that it has shipped over 8 million OES licenses to nearly 10,000 new and existing customers. That's not exactly a small number, considering that Novell only has 50,000 customers worldwide. However, even though the uptake of Linux kernels on OES has been relatively high, Novell's growth rate in raw SUSE Linux licenses is smaller than that of competitor Red Hat, and that vast installed NetWare server base, which drives tens of millions of seats worldwide, is not moving to OES fast enough to make up for declining NetWare sales. Messman did not talk about this, of course, because shows like BrainShare are about cheerleading.

But Messman did say that Novell was not going to pull the plug on NetWare just to get customers to move to Linux. He said that Novell would continue to support NetWare 6.5, the current implementation of the software and the last pure NetWare code, until 2015. "We will basically support NetWare 6.5 as long as customers want it," he said. "That's as close to forever as you can get."

Novell's commitment to OES is not just for this release. In fact, Novell announced that the next release of OES, code-named "Cypress," is due in the middle of 2007 and will incorporate many of the features of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10--specifically, server virtualization, improved integration with Microsoft's Active Directory and Novell's eDirectory products, and support for 64-bit X64 processors. Beyond that, an OES release code-named "Ponderosa" will follow, probably in 2008. The feature set for OES Ponderosa was vaguely defined as being related to Novell's future collaboration and workgroup software.

Novell did not add much to the font of knowledge about SLES 10's features, but did remind everyone that the storage foundation in SLES 10 would include Cluster File System 2 (contributed by Oracle), Enterprise Volume Manager, and Heartbeat 2 cluster monitoring.

Jeffrey Jaffe, Novell's new chief technology officer, tried to get the BrainShare crowd riled up when discussing Novell's technology leadership and its approach to developing software. He said that openSUSE has tens of thousands of registered users and has had over 1 million downloads since being launched last fall at LinuxWorld. He also said that nearly 90 percent of the employees at Novell are using Linux on the desktop, and about half of them do so exclusively.

"What many people are discovering is that the Linux desktop works just fine," he said, hammering on the last three words for effect. "Our entire company does most of its work on Linux. Are there a few power users who can't get by on a Linux desktop? Perhaps. But the fact is, open source and Linux in particular, have become an ideal environment for developing enterprise-class software, whether it is on the desktop or running major corporate workloads." He said that Novell's job was to sift through the more than 100,000 open source projects in the world and make sure that the appropriate technologies get into Novell platforms first.