Interview: Novell's Linux leanings and the interweaving of NetWare and SUSE

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 4 Feb 2005 at 16:20

At the launch of Novell's flagship OpenEnterprise Server, Brian Green, Director of Linux Solutions, talks us through the company's Linux leanings and the interweaving of NetWare and SUSE.

Why did Novell need to own a distribution and what does that contribute to the OpenEnterprise Server?

Novell has been a network and infrastructure company with a platform. We still have 100mn customers out there using NetWare, so a lot of our customers were asking us to consider Linux. So what drove us to acquire SUSE was the requirements of our installed base. That was initially, but when we looked closer at what's behind acquiring a Linux distribution we found that it allowed Novell as a company to break out of the workgroup computing market to enter new markets.

For example, I think it's fair to say that Novell hasn't played in the data centre for a long time. High performance computing? We haven't played there. Workstation? We haven't played there since we sold WordPerfect.

So there are two reasons we acquired it. One is to service the requirements of our existing installed base and to give them some more options. But more importantly from a Novell business perspective to open up new opportunities.

If you look at SUSE, which we now own, it offers file and print functionality. NetWare offers file and print functionality. So isn't there a conflict there? What NetWare has been doing is to offer a management structure over and above the file and print. So you've got system management, resource management, and you can tie that resource down to an identity, and you can do that from a single point across the enterprise. Unfortunately you can't do that today with a Linux distribution.

So what we've done is to take those NetWare technologies and make those services available on Linux to address that Linux need.

It's that combination that we're calling OpenEnterprise Server. It ships with both the NetWare kernel and the Linux kernel, and you can choose which one you implement. We've decoupled all of that infrastructure technology from the NetWare kernel.

But what would you say makes OES stand out?

The real big differentiator is the identity managment. If you want access control lists at an enterprise level tied into to your corporate identity which may be your HR system. Now that's available with OpenEnterprise server; it's not available with a Linux distribution.

And how does the desktop fit into this? At the moment it hasn't got that management infrastructure there, has it?

We're the number two contributor to OpenOffice. And really what we've added to OpenOffice is usabilitiy and interoperability. The reason we've done that is, for example, if I send a document such as this presentation here, if I send it in an OpenOffice format there's a 92 per cent chance that [the recipient] won't be able to open it. So we have to make sure that as we use OpenOffice in Novel, the default file format is the default file format for the rest of the world, which unfortunately is Office.

The other thing we've done is around distribution. We've included ZenWorks Linux Management into the desktop which is an evolution of Ximian Red Carpet. This allow us to deliver software packages to Linux, ensuring that we are aware of all the dependancies.

In terms of locking down desktops, what are you providing there?

That's what we're looking at going forward. What we provide today on Windows management with Zenworks, we can provide a policy-based management. We're looking at how we can take that technology and make it applicable to Linux.