WE’VE MOVED! Update Your Links and RSS Feed

I’m happy to announce that the OPS East Blog is now the OPS Americas Blog. We’ve moved everything over to:

OPSAMERICAS.COM

We will maintain this site as a historical archive.  This will be the last post on this site.

The blogging team has grown by almost double, so look forward to seeing some very interesting and exciting new areas of articles and howtos on the new blog.

Blog Stats for opseast

In the last year, since January 3rd or so, we have amassed the following stats:

• Total Views: 81,757
• Best Day Ever: 3,065
• Posts: 399
• Comments: 206
• Categories: 42

Thanks for a great run for this particular incarnation of the blog, we’re raring to go over at the Americas blog, so come see what’s happening.

Thanks everyone,

RossB

 

Novell BrainShare 2008 – Registration is Open

Novell BrainShare 2008

• Mar 16-21, 2008 @ Salt Lake City, UT
• Sign up for the industry’s premier technical conference today. Registration for BrainShare 2008 is officially open! Register now to reserve your spot at BrainShare 2008, and start reaping the benefits of being an “early bird”. Not quite ready to take the plunge? Take some time to look around this site and become familiar with why BrainShare is the place to be in 2008.
• Registration and more details

 

“Most Disaster Recovery Plans Will Fail”, Expert Says

From the article:

CHICAGO — At the Data Center Decisions conference in Chicago on Monday, Oct. 22, controversial comments from Jon Toigo, CEO and managing principal of Dunedin, Fla.-based Toigo Partners International LLC, had attendees shaking their heads in bewilderment.

For one, Toigo advised attendees against using VMware in favor of mainframe systems, calling the virtualization software “shoddy” in comparison. But nearly all conference attendees were assembled to learn about implementing virtualization in their data center.

Toigo is knowledgeable about disaster recovery (DR) planning, which was the topic of his keynote session, but he warned users against ever feeling completely secure with their disaster recovery plans.

More here.

 

Rochester Linux Day – Oct 23rd 2007

We had a great event at the Casa Larga Vineyard out in the east of Rochester NY, large crowd, lots of great questions, plenty of good food and comments about how helpful this was in helping people understand our offerings.

Our Linux Day events have been very successful in doing several things:

• Getting the news about new and updated products out to the public
• Showing the flag for Novell and in particular our Linux products
• Getting good conversation and feedback on how people are using the products
• Bringing in new customers and rekindling customer relationships anew

This was our last event for the Novell fiscal year, we on the team have really enjoyed doing our traveling events around the East region this year, many thanks to all who attended them, we’ll see at next year’s events for the latest and greatest!

RossB

 

Event: Linux Day – Rochester NY (Next Week!)

• 

• October 23, 2007 @ Casa Larga Vinyard
• This seminar will provide a comprehensive overview of Novell’s latest Linux advances in desktop, server, deployment, virtualization and security. The session will provide you and your fellow business decision makers with a strategy update pertaining to key pain points within organizations. In addition to learning about time, energy and cost saving changes you can make within your organization, you’ll also have the opportunity to network with your peers.
• Register Now

Click for more events and training in the East…

 

Quick thanks and shout outs…

Just wanted to drop in a quick thank-you entry to everyone who attended the recent Linux Day events in both Philadelphia PA (Sept 27) and Memphis TN (Oct 4).  The events were both filled with well above average registration/attendance rates, and there was some excellent Q&A dialog that was had in both cities.  Upcoming events can be found on this blog and consolidated here.

I’d also like to thank SoftMart for sponsoring the event in Philly (Nice to meet you, James and Amy).  You’re a great partner and we look forward to a bright future together!

Finally, I’d like to point out something that was new for me on this round of Linux Days — it started in Philly, and personally I think it was fantastic!  Half way through the event, an attendee came up to me and asked if I would quickly make an announcement about a local Linux user group right after the break.  I gave him the mic and he simply mentioned the LUG and announced the website for more info.  There were several interested attendees who jotted down the URL and we continued.  Something similar happened in Memphis yesterday.  Here’s a link to their respective sites:

• Philadelphia PA — (Sorry Philly attendee… I didn’t jot down your name or the URL.  Send me an email and I’ll edit this entry with your URL asap.  kchin at novell dot com)
• Memphis TN — Group of Linux Users in Memphis

I just thought it was a great way to reach out and let interested persons meet some additional Linux users.  So the moral of the story is… if you’re part of a local Linux User Group and you’re at one of our Linux Days — it certainly doesn’t hurt to ask the presenter during a break if you can plug your org.

 

Visit the Novell booth at the AMD Virtual Experience

AMD’s Virtual Experience is a pretty cool marketing/virtual tradeshow where you can view videos and short presentations on a variety of technologies related to AMD — such as SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Novell booth.

Of course, you could visit the other vendors at the virtual trade show, but why not start by checking out the Novell booth and learn how SLE takes advantage of the technologies in the latest generation of AMD Quad-core Opteron processors…

 

YaST – Thumbs up or Thumbs down?

Let us know what you think about YaST?  Whether you’re using YaST in openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Desktop, take this short survey and let us know how you’re using YaST today and how to improve it

The Survey will be available until mid-November and the results published on opensuse.org

 

So, I’m giving a talk at GTC…

If you’re in the Albany NY area this week, stop by the Goverment Technology Conference at the government plaza (under the “Egg”) on Thursday the 27th of September and you’ll learn all about how to take advantage of Open Source in Government.

Here’s the agenda and though pre-registration is closed, you can get in at the event the morning of.

See you there!

RossB

 

Event: Linux Day – Memphis TN (Next Week)

• 

• October 4, 2007 @ Memphis Marriott
• This seminar will provide a comprehensive overview of Novell’s latest Linux advances in desktop, server, deployment, virtualization and security. The session will provide you and your fellow business decision makers with a strategy update pertaining to key pain points within organizations. In addition to learning about time, energy and cost saving changes you can make within your organization, you’ll also have the opportunity to network with your peers.
• Register Now

Click for more events and training in the East…

 

Event: Linux Day – Philadelphia PA (This week)

• 
• September 27, 2007 @ Philadelphia Marriott Downtown
• This seminar will provide a comprehensive overview of Novell’s latest Linux advances in desktop, server, deployment, virtualization and security. The session will provide you and your fellow business decision makers with a strategy update pertaining to key pain points within organizations. In addition to learning about time, energy and cost saving changes you can make within your organization, you’ll also have the opportunity to network with your peers.
• Register Now

Click for more events and training in the East…

 

OpenOffice.org Conference 2007 in Barcelona

Every year, the heavyweights from the OpenOffice.org community come together to share ideas and hear about what others are doing to make OpenOffice.org the best office suite available.

If you’d like to poke your head in and see what kinds of things were discussed, here are several links which may interest you… they even were able to post some video recordings of some of the sessions.  Of course you’ll also find some of the presentations online — in ODF format of course!

OpenOffice.org Conference 2007 Barcelona Home page

Novell Open PR Blog entry (as a major contributor to OOo, we were a Premium sponsor)

Official OOo Conference 2007 Blog

 

Upcoming Adv Technical Training (ATT) – updated 9/7/07

Here are some upcoming Advanced Technical Trainings coming up in the East that you might be interested in — if you’re interested in becoming a SUSE Linux Enterprise expert that is…

ATT Training Events

• Migrating from UNIX to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 – Oct 2-5, 2007 @ Atlanta, GA
• Optimizing and Troubleshooting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 – Oct 9-12, 2007 @ New York, NY
• Novell ZENworks 7.2 Linux Management – Oct 23-26, 2007 @ Tampa, FL
• Xen Virtualization and High Availability Clustering on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
  - Nov 27-29, 2007 @ Philadelphia, PA

ATT Online Training

• Shell Scripting with BASH – Sept 20
• Linux High Availability Storage and Clustering – Sept 21

ATT Live 2007

• Three Intensive Days of Training – December 17-19, 2007 @ Provo, UT

For more details and registration links for any of these events, click here!!

 

Event: Linux Day – Vienna VA (last chance to register)

• August 29, 2007 @ Novell Office, Vienna, VA (Tysons Corner)
• This seminar will provide a comprehensive overview of Novell’s latest Linux advances in desktop, server, deployment, virtualization and security. The session will provide you and your fellow business decision makers with a strategy update pertaining to key pain points within organizations. In addition to learning about time, energy and cost saving changes you can make within your organization, you’ll also have the opportunity to network with your peers.
• Register Now

More events in the East…

 

How to Expand Linux: A report card on Ron’s LW Expo Talk

I won’t bore you with my analysis, TechTarget’s Jack Loftus gives an impassioned report of Ron Hovsepian’s Linux World Expo keynote and the slightly-less-than-controversy surrounding the press reaction to it.  A good read, and some great points.

RossB

 

Linux World 2007 in SF

Well, unfortunately I did not get to personally attend Linux World in San Francisco last week, but fortunately for me – there are tons of outlets for me to get details on what the buzz was all about last week. If any of you happened to be there, and have additional comments/insights to share, I’d love to see some comments posted…

SearchEnterpriseLinux’s Jack Loftus posted a blog entry which links to several other articles and interesting summaries… as good a place to start as any.

Then of course, there’s the official LinuxWorld 2007 conference website which has links to several major industry announcements and even promises to have videos of all the keynotes – although they aren’t posted quite yet.

If you’re interested in seeing some of Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian’s keynote where he discusses how we can accelerate adoption of Linux (in general), you can read a summary from Jack Loftus here, a summary from CNet here and watch the entire keynote via Flash here or even download Ron’s slides here. Personally, I think he did a good job of conveying the message (yes, I’m probably a bit biased, but I think his points are generally right on for enterprise Linux), and yes I truly think his points (if followed) would help Linux in general and SUSE.

Here’s a link to Novell’s press kit for Linux World – we had several exciting press announcements to share last week… definitely check these out!

You can also check out Novell CMO’s video blog entries from the Linux World show floor here and here.

Novell’s Russ Dastrup video guru also created a couple of videos for the show… here and here.

Finally, I’m one of those “visual” people… so I love multimedia. BIG THANKS to the folks at TechTargetTV for putting a series of videos together on YouTube which show some of the highlights/reflections of the conference. My favorite, has to be their video of the “Bag of Schwag” – pretty funny!

 

Ron H, Novell and a Vision of Green Data Centers

I remember during a recent customer briefing, that one of the attendees was primarily concerned with power savings and energy savings in the data center. Do you have a major interest in these “green” initiatives and what IT can do to help?

In the Linux World speech Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian gave yesterday, he highlighted some of our initiatives in that space. Not a lot of detail, but a good/quick review.

Check out the video clip here on CNet.

More green-related articles.

More Novell announcements from Linux World.

 

Protocols for Business, Not Just Networking

The Open Solutions Alliance has started holding a series of Customer Forums where CIO’s in particular are invited to come and share their experiences, discuss how to better interoperate between businesses with Open Source software and to network in general.

One of the issues they discuss and something I have noticed is that when dealing with multiple vendors for products and services, you may have to do widely disparate actions to get essentially the same thing to happen. Much in the same way that networking protocols helped build the massively collaborative environment you’re reading (and I’m writing) this with, businesses could do with a bit of protocolization.

For example, if you are a company that has products that require certification or FDA testing, etc, you have likely built a process that manages what has to happen from the beginning to the end of that certification/approval. If you have designed a process that works for your company and products, what will happen if your company gets bought, or buys another company that has products that have undergone a similar (for the sake of argument) process?

How do you take another company or organization’s processes and integrate them with yours? This is a very serious question, I have been part of companies that were on both sides of the corporate gastronomical experience, and it’s painful to say the least.

If you think of it, writing code and scripts to make things happen in a predictable manner is the technological equivalent of what human customs are, a recognized, repeatable method to get things to happen over and over.

See if you can attend one of the OSA’s Customer Forums, it’s good stuff.

RossB

 

Event: Lean Data Center Seminar – Plymouth Meeting MA (tomorrow)

• August 7, 2007 @ Plymouth Meeting, MA
• Register today to learn how the Xen virtualization functionality of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server optimizes your data center and makes all your resources – virtual and physical – more efficient and cost effective.
• Register Now

More events in the East…

 

Event: Web Seminar – Orchestrate

(Part of the Secure and Manage web seminar series…)

• October 24, 2007 @ 1pm ET
• Learn how Novell ZENworks Orchestrator, ZENworks Virtual Machine Management and other Novell data center management solutions and technologies can optimize your data center and make all your virtual and physical resources more efficient and cost effective. During this seminar, you’ll explore how these Novell solutions can help you consolidate servers, harness untapped server capacity, manage and maintain data center resources more effectively, and mitigate user errors and unexpected disasters..
• Register Now