Category Archives: Novell

More on Xen: Markus Rex tells ZDNet it’s ready for the enterprise

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From ZDNet:

At Novell’s Sydney office on Thursday, Rex responded to claims by Linux competitor Red Hat that Xen was not stable enough to be deployed in enterprise environments. Novell has claimed to be the first vendor to include Xen in its Linux distribution, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Xen, primarily developed by US-based start-up XenSource, allows users to run multiple operating systems as guest virtual machines on the same hardware.

“If you look at the Xen open source project, we have been the number two contributor during the past 10 months or so to that project. So we’ve kind of contributed most of the enterprise readiness for the Xen platform,” Rex said.

Red Hat only had to look at Novell’s launch of its new server for testimony that Xen was enterprise ready, according to Rex.

“We had all the major hardware partners that had virtualisation hardware like IBM, Intel and AMD. They all stood up and said ‘Yes, this technology’s ready, and we fully support deployments based on Xen and in combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise 10’.”

“So I guess the other vendors would not do that if it weren’t ready.”

Identity mashup

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Via Tim Daneliuk: Andy Oram on The Long View of Identity:

Because I care intently about online identity myself, I was excited to attend the Identity Mashup conference at Harvard Law school’s Berkman Center, one in a series of identity conferences held there. Coming out of a technology space into this legal space was a bit of a culture shock for me. When lawyers consider things–to speak very broadly–they look at how things can hurt people, while I might make an initial categorization of identity systems along social lines, such as:

* Identity systems that help individuals find each other
* Identity systems that facilitate commerce
* Identity systems that promote communities
* Identity systems that support online government
* etc.

…or along technical lines, such as:

* Identity systems based on taxonomies
* Identity systems based on the web of trust
* Identity systems based on digital signatures
* etc.

In contrast, lawyers categorize them as:

* Identity systems that facilitate fraud
* Identity systems that violate privacy
* Identity systems that let corporations control people
* etc.

Fortunately, the far-thinking Berkman Center can encompass all these different categorizations at once. The conference turned out to be a wonderful mashup of legal, technical, social, and business aspects of online identity. The value of such a conference became most apparent on the third day, when the formal sessions that attracted some two hundred attendees came to an end, but over fifty people from all sorts of disciplines came to a kind of unconference with no preset agenda.

We think Xen is ready

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From Jeff Jaffe’s blog:

In my last post, I argued that Linux needed enhancements to fully address the demands of a data center. I identified 7 key characteristics which were required. I also committed that I would describe how SUSE’s Code 10 addressed these needs. In my next post, I will provide some of this detail. But there’s some press play out there right now about one of the critical new benefits available in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 – virtualization – that I can’t let pass. A Red Hat VP has been telling the press that, although there is “unbelievable” demand for virtualization, that Xen, the leading open source virtualization offering, is not ready yet for the enterprise.

What does Novell believe? Xen is ready! What do other companies say? IBM has made it clear they’re supporting Xen now. I’m looking at another corporate press release supporting Xen from March 2006. The company “Formally Announces Integrated Virtualization”. Who is that company? Why, it is Red Hat! Do they really believe Xen virtualization is not ready? Or are they trying to introduce a little FUD into the market because another Linux vendor has beaten them to the punch by a good half year in terms of an integrated virtualization offering, including Xen? (In fact, Red Hat seems to be backtracking today, according to this story in the Register, so I’m not sure where they stand.) Xen is the leading open source project for virtualization for a reason – because it’s so strong. Novell and many others in the industry support it. If you have virtualization needs in the data center, we can deliver it today. Don’t be fooled….