the business value of linux for today’s...

Business White PaperDATA CENTER

www.novell.com

The Business Value of Linuxfor Today’s Enterprise

p. 2

Novell Adds Value to Your Business with Linux*

Linux* has found its way into the IT infra-structure of most businesses and is alreadypart of the modern data center. Now, withNovell® leadership, Linux gives you moreoptions than ever before. Novell deliverssoftware solutions that are open, secure andglobal, and with SUSE® Linux Enterprise,Novell addresses some of the most crucialpain points of your business—giving you real choice.

Linux in the Modern Enterprise

Choice plays a key role in keeping today’sbusinesses agile and profitable. With theemergence of enterprise-class service andsupport for Linux distributions, businessesnow have a competitive choice of operatingsystems for infrastructure services, workgroupcomputing and mission-critical applications.Until recently, organizations typically alignedthemselves with a proprietary operatingsystem—a partnership that meant vendorlock-in, high total cost of ownership (TCO)and lowered return on investment (ROI). Withits fully supported SUSE Linux Enterprise,Novell levels the playing field and frees youfrom single-vendor constraints. This paperdiscusses the Linux advantage in key areassuch as availability and scalability, manage-ment, security and software licensing.

From its inception, Linux has been free todownload and use. Although the landscapeis dotted by multiple distributions, the coredevelopmental philosophy has remainedconsistent. A highly capable global commu-nity of developers maintains and improvesthe Linux kernel, yielding a robust, reliable,

scalable and highly secure product through aconstant process of peer review. The collab-orative and open nature of the developmentprocess makes Linux an excellent valuecompared to proprietary operating systems.

The modern enterprise is a heterogeneousmix of proprietary and open source technolo-gies. In enterprises that have “standardized”on Microsoft* or UNIX*, it is common tohave other operating systems fill niche roles.Whether they are hosting a clustered data-base, an HPC environment, ERP solution orCRM package, these systems require thesame management attention as the othersystems, albeit from highly skilled staffmembers. This mixture of technologies andoperating systems fosters an environmentthat is complex, expensive, difficult to man-age and even more challenging to secure.The licensing costs, proprietary hardwarecosts, disparate management tools andstaffing required to support the distinctoperating systems lead to substantialexpense. The management of securitycreates additional expense through suchactivities as patch deployment and virus andintrusion detection and cleanup.

The earliest uses of Linux in the enterprisewere for non-mission-critical roles, usuallyfile/print and networking services such asDNS/DHCP. But with the growing maturity of the operating system and its supportecosystem, Linux began assuming a wider range of roles one or two years ago, includ-ing mission-critical ones previously reservedfor proprietary operating systems.

Choice plays a key

role in keeping today’s

businesses agile and

profitable. With the

emergence of enterprise-

class service and support

for Linux distributions,

businesses now have

a competitive choice of

operating systems for

infrastructure services,

workgroup computing

and mission-critical

applications.

p. 3

The Business Value of Linux for Today’s Enterprise www.novell.com

With the availability of commodity hardware inthe ‘90s, IT departments began segregatingapplications on separate servers to allowthem exclusive access to the availablehardware resources. But the low-cost hard-ware and dedicated server philosophy hasresulted today in server sprawl and a lack ofoverall utilization. On average, IT managersare seeing 5- to 15-percent utilization of these systems. Electrical consumption costs(which includes HVAC), management costsand licensing across hundreds of serverscreates an unreasonably high TCO andlowered ROI.

Enter Linux. Its modular design and opensource development address the concernsof the modern heterogeneous enterprise in anumber of ways. SUSE Linux Enterprise fromNovell decreases TCO and increases ROI withinnovative technologies in four main areas:

UtilizationManagementSecurityLicensing

It’s time to see how SUSE Linux Enterprisecan add value to your business.

Increased Utilization

In today’s highly competitive and globalbusiness environment, IT managers mustconstantly do more with less. This pressurehas spawned a trend in modern computing—server virtualization. Successful server virtu-alization can mitigate low utilization andserver sprawl, both of which can negativelyaffect operational costs. The benefits ofconsolidation are independent of companysize or industry and are vital to organizationswhose IT departments need to reduce costs.The process of consolidating workoads to

fewer physical servers while simultaneouslysatisfying existing SLAs and planning foreventual scale-out and -up initiatives hasnever been so important.

Virtualization technology is the linchpin in the consolidation movement because itdecouples the physical hardware from the operating system, allowing for multipledistinct operating systems to “live” inde-pendently on the same physical hardware.While virtualization is not a new technology, it has recently been reborn in the data centerto optimize commodity hardware and to take advantage of current management and hardware trends. Consequently, existingservers can be condensed onto fewer andpotentially smaller physical appliances. The net effect yields higher overall utilization,increased flexibility and reduced serversprawl. When implemented correctly, virtual-ization can increase enormously the overallutilization of existing resources. The ability tore-provision new servers as needed at asubstantially lowered cost also generatesunprecedented flexibility and agility. Likewise,consolidation reduces power consumptioncosts, including HVAC requirements. Bothfactors contribute directly to the maintenanceof an organization’s operational costs.

SUSE Linux Enterprise features the newestrelease of Xen* 3.3, a hypervisor. It is a soft-ware foundation that governs operatingsystems’ access to computer resources,such as memory and network adapters, inorder to securely execute multiple VirtualMachines (VMs)—each running its ownoperating system on a single physicalsystem. Developed by engineers at theUniversity of Cambridge as an open sourceproject, Xen is the industry’s fastest andmost secure server virtualization technology.

SUSE Linux Enterprise

from Novell decreases

TCO and increases

ROI with innovative

technologies in the

main areas utilization,

management, security

and licensing.

p. 4

Novell is committed to the propagation of Xen virtualization technologies. Thesetechnologies are included in SUSE LinuxEnterprise Server. Novell is able to take aleading role in the shift to virtualization-basedIT due to the convergence of commodityhardware and open source software—that is,Linux running on x86 and x86-64 computers.It’s a combination that is transforming racksof compute and storage servers into the pre-eminent enterprise IT platform. Virtualizationis also differentiating applications as theyevolve into self-contained modular services.Xen virtual machines take that evolution onegiant step further.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Xenvirtualization technology—coupled with open-standards-based management solutions andidentity-driven, directory-based technologies—enable your data center managers to treat allthe hardware and software in the data centeras a pool of interchangeable resource com-ponents. In effect, the technology now existsto dynamically bring together what you need,when you need it, and in ways that makesense for your business.

Although Xen has its roots in the open sourcecommunity, it has been endorsed and adoptedby many of the industry’s major vendors,including AMD, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM,Intel, Novell, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems.Because Xen technology is open source, it has continued to attract more and morecontributors—essentially becoming an open standard.

Comprehensive SystemsManagement

Centralized management is a modernenterprise code of conduct that allows staffto be comprehensively trained on a singleproduct. Within this model, system monitor-ing and configuration changes can be madefrom a single console. Centralization lowersTCO by increasing efficiency and removingthe need to cross train staff on multiplemanagement products. To date, however,the landscape of system management isflooded with management applications and appliances.

Many systems administrators agree thatinstalling and configuring a single server is a trivial task that becomes daunting, for avariety of reasons, when scaled across theenterprise. Different types of networks, suchas those based on Windows*, UNIX andLinux, need to interoperate. Security vulnera-bilities need to be continually monitored, andpatches need to be applied as soon as theyare available. Finally, as the business growsand more applications are deployed, the ITgroup must add, manage and maintain moremachines. Unfortunately, data center man-agers do not proportionately increase theresources needed to manage an expandingenvironment. The result is an overtaxed ITdepartment that struggles to support theorganization’s needs.

It’s widely agreed that Linux operatingsystems have been accompanied by weakcentralized management tools. Attempts toremedy this weakness have resulted in adiverse range of tools to perform certaintasks. The problem is that too many toolsare often required to perform any given task,and there is often more than one way toperform any single task.


ships with a comprehen-

sive set of administration,

configuration and

deployment tools to ease

the burden of systems

and subscription

management.

Novell is committed to the propagation of Xen virtualization technologies.

These technologies are included in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

p. 5


Novell AppArmor, an

open source technology

included in SUSE Linux

Enterprise, proactively

protects the operating

system and applications

from external or internal

threats, even zero-day

attacks, by enforcing

good program behavior

and preventing even

unknown software flaws

from being exploited.

SUSE Linux Enterprise ships with a compre-hensive set of administration, configurationand deployment tools to ease the burden of systems and subscription management.No other Linux platform is as easy to deploy,configure and maintain as SUSE LinuxEnterprise. The market-leading set of inte-grated systems management capabilitiesincluded with SUSE Linux Enterprise featuresthe following:

YaST is a comprehensive installation,configuration and administration suiteunique to SUSE Linux Enterprise. It is acommon foundation that not only simplifiesthe management of the operating systembut also of accompanying services suchas a DNS server, an Apache* Web server,Samba fileshares, Xen virtual servers andeven third-party applications.AutoYaST is a time-saving tool thatautomatically performs installation andconfiguration on similar servers. An extensionto YaST, it automates installation to a largenumber of machines. Because installationscan be performed in parallel without userintervention, AutoYaST saves organizationstremendous amounts of time.Novell ZENworks® Linux Management

complements YaST by enabling your ITadministrators to centrally control any systemin your enterprise as your network grows.Novell ZENworks Linux Management offersall the tools and capabilities you need toextend enterprise-class resource manage-ment to distributed Linux systems—efficiently and cost effectively.Novell Customer Center is a new portalwhere you can easily manage all yourbusiness and technical interactions withNovell, including contracts, subscriptionsand support entitlements. From one location,you can review the status of all your Novellproducts, subscriptions and services—andobtain critical Linux updates and support.Subscription Management Tool (SMT) isa package proxy system that helps you

manage your SUSE Linux Enterprise soft-ware updates while maintaining corporatefirewall policy and regulatory compliancerequirements. The tool is integrated withNovell Customer Center (NCC). Visitwww.novell.com/linux/smt for additional information on SMT.

Managing a data center requires you to dealwith heterogeneous and distributed environ-ments. Often each device defines its ownrepresentation of management information.You have to account for different semantics,terminology, data structures and protocols.You can spend a lot of time and effort tryingto unite these silos of management data toachieve a single and consistent representationof all management data. And collecting theinformation to manage an entire data centeris just one part of the management challenge.Normalizing, organizing and analyzing thatdata is just as critical to ensuring successfuldata center management.

End-to-end management across the diversecomponents of a distributed environment is both a reality and a requirement. It is nolonger sufficient to manage personal com-puters, servers, subnets, network core,storage and software in isolation. Thesecomponents all interoperate to provideconnectivity and services. Informationregularly crosses these boundaries, and management must do the same.

To address these requirements, SUSE LinuxEnterprise integrates and supports the openWBEM/CIM industry standard as a vendor-independent, robust and descriptive frame-work for systems management. Support forthe WBEM/CIM industry standards simplifiessystems management across distributedand heterogeneous environments. With SUSELinux Enterprise, Novell promotes theseopen standards and achieves enterprisereadiness for the data center.

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Security

A major pain point in modern technicalenvironments is security—or lack of it. WithWindows dominating the computing market(more than 70 percent market share), enter-prises often attribute downtime to virus/intrusion cleanup, and constant security patchdeployment. These factors affect TCO nega-tively. Applications in Windows are often written to run at the administrator level, making them the perfect gateway for hackersor malicious code to gain access to the operating system. Due to architectural differ-ences, Linux is inherently more secure thanWindows. Most applications on Linux are not designed to run with such root privileges,limiting the amount of damage a hacker ormalicious code can do. Still, many securityvulnerabilities result from bugs in “trustedprograms” that could allow an attacker toacquire root privileges.

Red Hat was the first to answer the call,developing SELinux (Security EnhancedLinux) in conjunction with the NSA (NationalSecurity Agency). SELinux implementsmandatory access controls that use labeledsecurity (the application to each data file of atag identifying that file’s appropriate securitylevel). While SELinux provides a high level ofsecurity protection against software vulnera-bilities, its configuration can be extremelycomplicated, making it difficult to deploywithout a significant investment in time,expertise and resources.

A much easier-to-use alternative exists in the form of Novell AppArmor™, an opensource technology included in SUSE LinuxEnterprise. AppArmor proactively protectsthe operating system and applications fromexternal or internal threats, even zero-dayattacks, by enforcing good program behaviorand preventing even unknown software flawsfrom being exploited. AppArmor security pro-

files completely define what system resourcesindividual programs can access, and withwhat privileges. A number of default policiesare included with AppArmor, and you can usea combination of advanced static analysis andlearning-based tools to deploy AppArmorpolicies for even very complex applicationsin a matter of hours. AppArmor features aname-based design and does not require re-labeling of the file system. Its implementa-tion addresses the issue of data integrity andplaces a high value on enterprise require-ments, especially ease of implementationand performance.

Licensing

Licensing is another pain point for today’s IT managers. Many Microsoft customers arefrustrated with the cost of licenses as well as the Microsoft Software Assurance plan.With Vista, most plans may have expired, forcing enterprises to purchase licenses as ifthey were never in the program. The secondpain point is the high TCO of Windows com-pared to any Linux competitor. In contrast toWindows, where a usage license drives thebusiness model, enterprise-class Linux distri-butions follow a subscription-based businessmodel. Subscription levels vary from merelyobtaining security updates, fixes and patchesto worldwide 24x7 support offerings. Whilethe use of Linux itself is free of charge, anyenterprise-relevant distribution must beaccompanied by support or maintenanceofferings. Only such support and servicescan ensure that production systems will stay productive to prevent costly data loss or system downtime.

SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell comeswith subscription or support bundles atmultiple levels. Novell also offers enterpriselicensing models and support or service-levelagreements for all its products.


from Novell addresses

the concerns of modern

computing from the data

center to the desktop.

With a world-class

support team of more

than 800 dedicated Linux

engineers, it would be

difficult to find a more

capable solution partner.

p. 7


Conclusion

The benefits of Linux and open source offercompelling business value for today’s com-plex enterprise. Decision makers are learningthat a Linux solution exists for most of theircomputing challenges. The number of appli-cations supported on Linux systems is grow-ing rapidly, and Linux operating systems areas robust as their proprietary counterpartswhile being more secure and less expensive.

SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell addressesthe concerns of modern computing from thedata center to the desktop. With a world-classsupport team of more than 800 dedicatedLinux engineers, it would be difficult to find a more capable solution partner.

This paper has touched some common pain points that enterprises are experiencing.

Specific topics of interest are covered ingreater detail in a variety of white papers and case studies that can be found atwww.novell.com/linux. The road to a moreagile, secure and reliable computing envir-onment is not a lonely one, nor is it the same for all. Novell understands the uniquerequirements of your environment andindustry, and provides assessment andconsulting services on a global scale toassist with your migration. These servicesgive you the confidence and conciseanswers you need to get maximum value from your Open Enterprise.

For more information on all open sourcetechnologies mentioned above, please visit www.novell.com or have a look at ourTechnical Linux Library at www.novell.com/linux/technical_library.

462-002048-002 | 03/09 | © 2009 Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. Novell, the Novell logo, the N logo, SUSE and ZENworks areregistered trademarks, and AppArmor is a trademark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

*All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Contact your local NovellSolutions Provider, or call Novell at:

1 800 714 3400 U.S./Canada1 801 861 1349 Worldwide1 801 861 8473 Facsimile

Novell, Inc.404 Wyman Street Waltham, MA 02451 USA

www.novell.com

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