* Reduce the cost of maintaining SLES in vSphere environments.
* Obtain direct technical support from VMware for both vSphere and SLES.
* Simplify your purchasing and deployment experience.

In addition, VMware plans to standardize our virtual appliance-based products on SLES for VMware further simplifying the deployment and ongoing management of these solutions.

With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware®, customers who purchase a VMware vSphere™ license and subscription also receive a subscription for patches and updates to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware® at no additional cost

More details here.

Managing this Linux life-cycle within enterprises is leading to sustained and strong demand for both solutions and services that enable organizations to fast-track their way to an intelligent and compliant Linux infrastructure.

Securelinx is currently assisting a number of Irish organizations to quickly and effectively bring their Linux estates into full and sustainable manageability. Our combination of best of breed solutions and highly experienced engineers ensure the full benefits of an Intelligent Linux Infrastructure are available – today.

Please contact us to receive further information or to enroll for one of our upcoming seminars.

This year, Novell is planning more than 100 technical breakout sessions, including several hands-on training and in-depth technical sessions. There will also be an exhibit hall featuring Novell technical demonstrations and partner products. And throughout the week attendees will have the opportunity to network with peers to exchange ideas, explore solutions and compare best practices.

The conference will be held 18-21 May 2010, in Amsterdam.

As a Novell Platinum Partner Securelinx will be attending this years BrainShare conference as well as taking part in the Partner Symposium. We hope to see you there.

Rationalize Software Licenses

An inventory of licenses should uncover those that are idle, underused, and even incorrect. Tools like Zenworks Asset Management can be used to create an inventory of all applications used across the enterprise and reconcile those numbers with the existing licenses. That can be a base for a comprehensive review of how many licenses are truly necessary, to retire those that aren’t, and to then negotiate greater discounts by consolidating licenses.

Standardise technologies

As a company grows it acquires a diversity of technologies including programming languages, operating systems, and integration tools. This runs contrary to the notion of accomplishing work with a minimum expenditure of time and effort. A careful review will point out redundant versions, unsupported technologies, and nonstandard tools that should give way to fewer, more standard systems. The cost savings come from simpler and consolidated procurement, as well as lower support and maintenance expenditures.

Securelinx advises choosing a single Linux vendor, be it Red Hat, Novell/SUSE or another vendor. This helps to avoid the problem of having patchwork systems that require substantially more time and money for support and maintenance, at the expense of budgets, new IT capabilities, and innovation. It may also be the opportunity to accelerate a move away from an expensive Unix platform. For a number of years we have observed migrations from legacy Unix systems, to Intel-based hardware coupled with a Linux Operating System. This duo provides a number of advantages. From the financial perspective – commoditized hardware reduces costs and puts the company in a good bargaining position, as it can play various hardware vendors against each other. From a staff perspective – the similarities between Unix and Linux allow, with little training, the transfer of existing skills to support the new environment.

Encourage reuse

Too many companies spend precious IT resources reinventing the wheel. A serious review of an existing project portfolio will probably uncover a number of opportunities to reuse existing solutions and build a common repository of services and solutions. The starting point is to learn what systems exist in the organisation, what application(s) they run, and what level of resources they consume. These apparently obvious questions often prove difficult to answer without historical data that tracks resource usage. A number of software vendors address this problem by offering solutions for availability and performance monitoring. The most popular commercial ones are OP5 Monitor, ManageEngine’s Applications Manager, or Solarwinds. There are also open source projects, lead by the long-established and highly customisable, Nagios.

Consolidate systems that do similar things

Different business units in the same company often have their own versions of essential systems, such as payments and Internet applications. Consolidating these systems at the corporate level can bring substantial savings and make processes simpler and more efficient. The effectiveness of the task depends on intra-departamental communication. In addressing each opportunity, the CIO and business leaders must evaluate trade-offs between short-term convenience and short- and long-term costs and complexity for company as a whole.

Knowledge of usage patterns we mentioned previously may (for example) identify candidates for virtualisation. Most of the commercial Linux vendors bundle virtualisation technology as a part of the operating system and even basic subscription options allow users to run multiple virtual machines on a single host. Consolidation of physical servers and applications increases server utilization, thus lowering hardware, maintenance and electrical costs. It may be done at the unit level, offering some savings, but the most gains from consolidation can be realised if it is agreed and supported at organisational level.

You can’t rely on infrastructure solutions to protect this critical information, because in many cases the infrastructure simply isn’t involved: both the information and the attacker trying to steal it are on a customer site, in a hotel, or at a wireless hotspot. And even if the notebook or workstation itself is not stolen, gigabytes of data can be copied to a thumbdrive and taken away in a matter of seconds.

To protect this data from prying eyes, you need to use encryption. This can ensure that even if an attacker gets their hands on the data, it is unreadable and unusable. But not just any encryption solution will work in the enterprise setting: the encryption system and its key-management need to be centrally controlled and coordinated, because otherwise each protected notebook or workstation becomes cut off from the others and productivity is badly hurt.

ZENworks Endpoint Security Management gives you the ability to protect your mobile data by actively enforcing corporate encryption policy on Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista endpoints.

• Centrally create, distribute, enforce and audit encryption policies on all endpoints and removable storage devices
• Encrypt all files saved or copied to a specific directory on a volume
• Encrypt all files copied to removable storage devices
• Manage keys through the Management Console, which also controls firewall, wireless security, VPN enforcement, endpoint integrity and removable storage device security
• Share files freely within an organization while blocking unauthorized access to files
• Share password-protected, encrypted files with people outside the organization through an available decryption utility
• Easily update, backup and recover keys according to policy without losing data

Related: 
Zenworks Endpoint Security Management Features and Benefits
Securelinx implementation and support services

What is Novell On-demand Training?

On-demand Training provides a convenient and flexible delivery method that is available whenever and wherever you are available. Accessible online anytime and anywhere a high-speed broadband Internet connection is available, this is the perfect option if you don’t have the time or budget for onsite or even scheduled online classroom training. It’s ready and waiting when you have just a small amount of time, for example, while you’re waiting for a backup to finish running before going to lunch.

Consisting of demos of technologies as well as recorded instructor lectures, On-demand Training eliminates the need for time away from work for travel and training, reducing expenses and lost productivity while still giving you the expertise you need to remain competitive.

Available Courses

With more than 40 courses available, the Novell On-demand Training library provides training at four different levels:

* First Look courses cover the fundamentals of installation, basic configuration and new features of a product. This training prepares you to continue on your learning path toward other Novell courses and certifications.

* End-user courses are targeted directly at your end users, for example, everyone in your company that uses GroupWise or all those migrating to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. These courses give them a working knowledge of those client applications and operating systems.

* Administrator-level courses teach the basic, day-to-day operations of products that enable you to use them productively. Many of these administrator-level courses cover necessary information for Novell certifications.

* Engineer-level courses provide intermediate to advanced training on special products and their uses. While not as advanced as Advanced Technical Training, or Novell ATT, engineer-level courses go far beyond normal day-to-day administration topics and allow you to function as if you have had some of the most advanced training available!

Contact Us for further information and purchasing options.

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Novell’s Privileged User Manager helps IT managers manage the access and identity of superuser and root accounts by providing controlled superuser access to administrators, thus allowing them to perform jobs without needlessly exposing root account credentials. It also provides a centralised activity log across multiple platforms supporting both good security practice and strict compliance requirements. Furthermore as this solution integrates with all Unix and Linux environments, it provides a single centralised management capability across mixed environments.

For further information on the benefits of Novell User Manager contact Securelinx today. Further information on the product benefits and the complete list of supported Linux & Unix platforms is also available here.

“As I’ve traveled to meet customers, I’ve felt a difference between my meetings in the spring and the fall,” he says. “Companies that would not meet me in the spring were very interested by the fall”.

Since 2002 Securelinx has played a key role positioning Linux solutions within the Irish marketplace. Our market efforts have successfully matured to a point where Linux now enjoys a “preferred platform” status in many leading Irish organizations, (case study: Quinn Direct Insurance) and the effectiveness and suitability of Linux as a platform for enterprise applications is well and truly established. (case study: Ogilvy).

Today, with such widespread market acceptance it can be easy to overlook the fact that Linux still offers a highly cost effective way to solve many IT infrastructure issues. Effective cost control has been a consistent mainstay of Securelinx’s market approach over the years and as Mr Whitehurst’s timely reminder points out, the fundamental cost advantage of Linux is once again attracting a new wave of potential adopters.

For more information on how Linux solutions can deliver value for money for your organization contact us today.