14 DAY TRIAL // The bridge Microsoft and Novell are building between Windows and Linux is focused on four main aspects: virtualization and systems management technologies, directory integration and identity, and last but certainly not least, delivering a common ground for office document formats, namely Open XML and Open Document Format. Essentially, the interoperability and intellectual property assurance agreement Microsoft inked with Novell in November 2006 is focused on the corporate world. This space is becoming increasingly characterized by parallel deployments of both Windows and Linux operating systems. In order to ensure that heterogeneous environments running mixed solutions will still act as singular units, Microsoft and Novell have partnered to build, support and market Windows-Linux interoperability.
Frost & Sullivan is currently offering a white paper entitled "Novell and Microsoft: Building Bridges", delivering an insight into the aspect of the Microsoft and Novell collaboration, following a series of roundtable discussions focused on the agreement between the two companies. "SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell is today hosting mission-critical applications such as SAP, and large banks are running financial trading applications on the platform. The collaboration with Microsoft and our joint interoperability work will give customers news options and greater flexibility in their data centers going forward," stated Richard Fanous, Microsoft Alliance Executive.
"I believe Novell has made a brave move in acknowledging that mixed environments are a reality. Customers will very often need to use both Windows, as well as Linux for specific deployments. And it is incumbent on us to ensure that customers do not suffer because these two technologies refuse to talk to each other. In that sense, this move to ensure interoperability clearly drives customer benefit. And the best proof point today is the work that has been done in allowing the two operating systems to co-exist efficiently, in virtualized environments, even on a single system," Sandeep Menon, Director - Linux Business, Novell West Asia.
At the beginning of September, the two companies delivered on another aspect of the interoperability promise they made in 2006, with the Microsoft and Novell Interoperability Lab, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The lab features no less than 80 x86-based, dual-core and quad-core servers. In fact, the image included at the top of this article is an actual look at the Microsoft and Novell lab layout. With the new initiative, the companies aimed to put together an environment that shares the best of the two worlds.
"For now, we're focused on testing three areas of interoperability. The first is virtualization, where we're intent on validating the interoperability of SLES running on Windows Server virtualization and Windows Server 2008 running on Xen. Our second area of focus is web-services management. We are currently working with the development teams at both Microsoft and Novell to identify the test cases we want to use to validate client-server implementations of the web-services management protocol from both companies. Our third area of interest is identity federation where our planning for the lab is just now getting underway," revealed Tom Hanrahan, Microsoft's Director of Linux Interoperability.