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Novell Puts Out SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 Service Pack 1

Forgive me for letting this slip through the cracks. At the end of January, when I was traveling to a tradeshow, commercial Linux distributor Novell announced Service Pack 1 for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 distribution.

Service Pack 1 contains all of the security patches and bug fixes that were issued for SLES 9 between the August 2004 launch of that product and the January 31 launch of SLES 9 SP1. The updated software also includes new device drivers for more recent hardware platforms and supports 64-bit main memory addressing on Xeon and Opteron processors; this was already supported on Itanium and Power processors. SP1 includes support for hotplug CPUs on IBM S/390 and zSeries mainframes, extended scalability for Silicon Graphics's Altix Linux-Itanium servers (scaling out to 512 processors in a shared, NUMA memory space), and tweaks to improve disk performance.

Novell said you have to have a valid Upgrade Protection support contract from Novell to get SP1. While there ought to be a way to get the software from a free download, there doesn't seem to be a way to do that from the Novell site.

Red Hat Grows Revenue By 58 Percent in Fiscal 2005

Linux industry juggernaut Red Hat finished off fiscal 2005 with a bang last week, booking $196.5 million in sales for the prior 12 months, up 58 percent. Subscription sales for the enterprise line of products (mainly workstation and server Linuxes) were up 120 percent for the year, but retail sales were down to just under $2 million from $13.5 million in fiscal 2004. Sales in the embedded markets of Red Hat products were off a smidgen to just under $1.8 million. For the full year, sales of services for enterprise products were $42.3 million, up 12 percent, and services for embedded products fell to $3 million, down 34 percent. Net income for the year was $51.5 million, more than triple what Red Hat brought to the bottom line in fiscal 2004.

In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2005, Red Hat's enterprise product revenues were up 92 percent to $45.4 million (and up 19 percent compared to the fiscal third quarter), and retail and embedded sales were improving. Total services were essentially flat at $11 million, and overall sales were up 56 percent to $57.5 million. Red Hat said it sold 175,000 new subscriptions and renewals for its server products in the quarter. The company brought $13.4 million to the bottom line in the quarter.

Red Hat said while it was optimistic about fiscal 2006, it expected sales growth to cool to about 40 percent growth, and pegged its sales for this year at between $270 million and $280 million.

Mandrakesoft Clustering Gets New Release

Linux distro Mandrakesoft announced last week that it has tweaked its Mandrakesoft Clustering middleware and put out a new release of the code. The software, which is based on a collection of open source programs that work with Linux to lash machines together to make high performance computing (HPC) clusters, includes new scripts and a deployment tool that can set up a node in a cluster in a few minutes, according to Mandrakesoft. Equally importantly, the URPMI package management program at the heart of Mandrakelinux has been parallelized so it can update multiple nodes in a cluster and keep them in synch as patches are applied to the nodes in the cluster.

The updated of Mandrakesoft Clustering, which costs €1,990 ($2,200), includes support for the Linux 2.6 kernel, the 64-bit memory extensions in the Xeon and Opteron processors, and InfiniBand interconnection fabric. Mandrakesoft has been selling this specialized version of Linux for three years, and it grew out of a project that it worked on with French server maker Bull for Réseau National des Technologies Logicielles.

OSDL Picks Hot Shot CIO for Board of Directors

Open Source Development Labs said last week that it has asked Frank Fanzilli to join its board of directors. Fanzilli is the former managing director and global CIO of financial powerhouse Credit Suisse First Boston, and he is steeped in Wall Street, venture capital, and hard core information technology as it is used in some of the toughest environments on the planet. He was a PeopleSoft board member until Oracle ate it. While at CSFB, he managed a $2 billion IT budget and 4,000 people, and was an early adopter of Linux technologies. Prior to his 18-year career at CSFB, he was a manager for systems engineers at IBM's financial services accounts.

OSDL also announced the Korean Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute has joined the organization and will be participating in the Carrier Grade Linux and Data Center Linux projects.

Linux Networx Gets Patent for Icebox Management Appliance, Hires New Head of Sales

High performance computing specialist Linux Networx has received a patent from the United States Patent and Trademark Office for its Icebox management appliance, which it created to help it better manage clusters of Linux servers. Specifically, Icebox controls the power distribution within Linux Networx's server nodes, which are called Evolocity and were the first vertically mounted servers. (This allows heat to rise out of the racks more easily, allowing for denser packing of server nodes in a cluster.) The Icebox device also provides serial terminal access to nodes in the cluster.

In a separate announcement, the company has announced that Rene Copeland has been tapped to become executive vice president for global sales and marketing at the company. Copeland had a two-decade career at various companies with the Cray name in them. (Cray split, then half of it was acquired by Tera Computer and renamed Cray. Yes, it was confusing, particularly when Cray Research built computers and Cray Computer did research and design of supercomputers.) Copeland was also in charge of the manufacturing of IBM's RS/6000 SP PowerParallel supercomputers in the mid-1990s between his stints with Cray Research and Cray.

Oregon DOT, Deutsche Bahn Opt for SUSE Linux

Novell is keeping the PR heat on Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms, and announced that the Oregon Department of Transportation and Deustche Bahn are consolidating big servers on competitive platforms to SUSE Linux running on IBM's zSeries mainframes.

At ODOT, the state's driver's license management system, which is a homegrown mainframe application, was ported to mainframe Linux using open source development tools and away from IBM's expensive software licenses for its proprietary software platforms. By moving the application to Linux and staying on the mainframe, ODOT cut its software costs by 30 percent. Somewhat surprisingly, ODOT said it rewrote its application in 80 hours to run on SUSE Linux.

At Deustche Bahn, the German national railroad, some 300 Windows-based servers that the railroad uses to host the Domino/Notes email system are being consolidated onto a zSeries 990 mainframe and put on Linux partitions. So far, about 55,000 Notes email users have been moved to the mainframe, and the railroad is moving a Unix-based train timetabling system to Linux on the mainframe as well. The railroad's SAP ERP suite will also be moved to the mainframe-Linux platform, and by the end of 2005, the institution's entire Web, application, and database infrastructure will move to mainframe-Linux.

Arkeia Partners with Federal Edge to Sell Backup to Uncle Sam

Linux backup and recovery software maker Arkeia has partnered with Federal Edge in hopes it will get both organizations more government business. Arkeia has backup software for Linux, which is hot these days with governments around the world, and Federal Edge, which specializes in selling IT products to the federal government, has the GSA schedule that is tough to come by. By becoming a value-added reseller of Arkeia's, Federal Edge makes it easier for government agencies to buy solutions like Arkeia's Network Backup and Server Backup.