Novell unveils SUSE Linux updates at BrainShare

Novell has released an update to its SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 designed to offer improved virtualisation, availability and support.

The SP1 edition of the product, shown off at the firm's BrainShare event in Amsterdam, features improved virtualisation support including the latest Xen 4.0 hypervisor and the KVM open source virtualisation hypervisor.

Availability has also been improved with support for metro area clusters, and node recovery functionality has been enhanced with the addition of the ReaR disaster recover framework.

Novell said that it is implementing more flexible support options that will allow customers to remain on older package releases during the product's lifecycle, and will make deployment of upcoming service packs easier by allowing customers to decide when and how to upgrade.

"With SP1 we are we delivering technical innovations that allow customers to run mission-critical workloads reliably, securely and affordably, and providing commercial support and partner programmes with unprecedented flexibility, innovation and control," said Markus Rex, senior vice president and general manager of open platform solutions at Novell.

The company has also launched the Identity Manager 4 family of identity and access management products. The latest release aims to ensure that customers can implement consistent identity, security and compliance policies for their entire IT ecosystem, said Novell.

The products enable centralised user provisioning, roles management and secure access to resources and applications in the datacentre or in the cloud, with the aim of improving corporate data protection while reducing the cost and complexity of compliance, according to Novell.

Identity Manager 4 extends the capabilities of Novell Identity Manager 3.6 to improve scalability, and offers tight integration with Microsoft SharePoint, SAP enterprise resource management systems and cloud applications including Google Apps.

The software also offers reporting capabilities, data cleansing tools and policy framework designs. Identity Manager 4 Advanced edition provides even more sophisticated roles management and intelligent reporting capabilities, the firm said.

"The emergence of virtual and cloud-driven business models has created new challenges around identity and access management," said Ron Hovsepian, chief executive of Novell.

"Novell Identity Manager 4 delivers a secure, cloud-ready platform to address this challenge so that customers can benefit from intelligent workload management."