Novell bids to push Linux into mission-critical computing

Novell announced a massive partnership campaign at its annual BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City this week in a bid to push Linux into mission-critical computing.

The networking and Linux company is looking to help software houses port to Linux, by offering its global scale to help market and support applications, speed development and certification on its SUSE platform, and integrate identity management components that fit in with its own identity technologies.

It announced a strengthening of its relationship with open source middleware company JBoss – builder of the popular application server – in which Novell will donate code and engineering resources and steer a number of products under the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS).

That middleware stack will also be brought into Novell’s own products, such as its exteNd identity services.

Novell announced closer ties to storage specialist Veritas, with new certification plans for Veritas storage management and high availability products on SLES 9 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9). Veritas customers will get access to beta products for SLES 9, including its upcoming Storage Foundation High Availability – a storage management suite integrating the company’s Cluster Server, Volume Manager and File System products.

Novell announced initiatives to encourage new partnerships through its Market Start initiative. This will give open source companies access to Novell’s global marketing and distribution channels and resources to quickly certify products for the SUSE platform. It will also allow those ISVs to offer their customers support through Novell – an attractive proposition for enterprise customers that are used to getting their support through a single vendor in the proprietary world.

To ensure enterprise customers’ additional confidence, Novell launched its Validated Configuration Program to test and certify a range of application and platform stacks for Linux – a move that to some extent mirrors Sun’s reference architectures from a software standpoint. Novell’s partners can be assured that such software combinations won’t throw up incompatibilities or performance issues for their customers.