Friday, May 27, 2011

Novell, Who?

Well, the fat lady has sung, and Novell is no more. I'd like to say the company fought the good fight, but I can't bring myself to do so. I expected, or at least hoped for, a better end. We are now evaluating our options as to how quickly we can work our way out of Novell's presence in our environment. File and print? Underway. Zenworks? Probably no later than the end of this year. Novell client? A little longer; that wraps into e-mail. We are evaluating RFPs now, and should have an action plan for conversion in 2012. That leaves Linux. We have been heavily committed to SuSE, using it for file and print as well as Oracle RAC clusters. File and print will be going Microsoft, and our AD implementation is in process. I expect that we will migrate our Linux to Red Hat. I have no desire to put our databases on Microsoft servers - they tend to be too expensive and clustering for RAC is hard enough in a Linux environment.

I hope Attachmate likes owning what's left of Novell - I expect operations similar to ours are making similar plans, and in the next few years Novell will be another memory, something like Netscape. Bits and pieces may live on, but the vital essence will be gone.

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