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HHS Signs Major Linux Deal With Novell
An anonymous reader writes "The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has signed a major deal with Novell to begin rolling out their enterprise server and desktop products on government systems. The contract provides unlimited use of Novell products to about 70,000 at HHS, including about 30,000 NIH users. Under the arrangement Novell is providing to HHS 'unlimited access, upgrade protection and technical support' for products, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Novell Open Enterprise Server, Novell Linux Desktop, patch management, and a range of identity-based services for management, integration and security."
In my experience with Novell eDirectory and Microsoft ADS, it's a good thing they chose Novell, particularly for an operation of their size. This is also good news for Novell. Here's hoping Novell can make this all work well enough that nobody's left gun-shy afterwards.
from the brink. They were sooo circling the drain as a company until the got involved with Linux. It's nice to see them back in the saddle. I've always been of the opinion that Novell makes some of the finest software in the world. I mean, please... nothing was/is better than NDS. Full stop. Borderware is a damn fine piece of security software. Netware was/is bulletproof.
Kudos to Novell's management for seeing the light.
Kind of interesting. I work at HHS in Rockville, the second largest HHS building. We were running Novell for a long time but 2 months ago switched to Microsoft ADS. I wonder if this means we will be going back? If so, somebody is getting canned because most of the servers were down for long periods of time during the switch accumulating quite a bit of lost time and resources.
I work for the Dept of Health & Human Services as a Solaris admin, so I have the insider info here. Everyone - and I mean everyone - knows that the Bush administration would instantly fire the head of ANY cabinet dept that failed to purchase Microsoft software. The current thinking within the administration is that open source software is "unamerican" and "socialist".
Everyone here at the DHHS knows that this is just a play to secure a better deal from Microsoft.
So sorry, slashdot... this has happened so many times, I really didn't think you'd get suckered again.
...for contractors such as myself whose clients include big civilian federal agencies.
I try to pitch open technologies when I can, but there is historical bias against open platforms like Linux. The more announcements like this happen, the easier it becomes to make a case for Linux/BSD on the server, and maybe some day on the desktop. I suspect that as a few of the more progressive agencies adopt Linux, the more conservative ones will follow.
Protecting Windows against the malware of the week in a big enterprise is a tough job. Enterprise system management is also a tough job without an army of foot soldiers who scurry around fixing breakages in software distribution system endpoints.
Linux/BSD starts looking pretty good when you start talking tens of thousands of machines to manage...
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
Just as soon as the 'unlimited' tech support comes into play I would expect. No matter the system, support tends to such, and with no limits, there's no limit to how much it will suck.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I see the traditionaly business practice of a Loss Leader.
In the long term, this will likely cost Novell more than they got.
However, to get a good track record in a market sector, you first need to get into that sector.
Novell seem to be doing this with a high profile agency, whose requirements (government agencies don't usually have the latest and greatest stuff unless forced to by external pressure, such as MS upgrade paths) are likely to be reasonably mild.
That way, they get PR, and visibility in the sector far above what it's cost them in loss by taking on the contract.
This one doesn't even pass the smell test.
For one, the White House has nothing to do with software purchases by government agencies. Plenty of government agencies use non-Microsoft and open source software - including the FBI, NSA, CIA, and others.
Second, the HHS has already signed the deal with Novell, which means your argument is utterly moot.
Finally, you offer absolutely no evidence that you work for HHS. In fact, I'd put money that you didn't even get the name of the agency right. Not once have I heard a single HHS employee use the term DHHS, and I used to know several people who worked there. An employee of a government agency wouldn't mess up the name of their agency in the way you did.
Arguing that the Administration would use the terms "unamerican" or "socialist" is also completely asinine on its face. If there was a push to eliminate open-source software, there are plenty of bureaucratic ways of doing it. And not once have I seen a government memo that would use such terms to describe anything.
Based on your comments, I can only conclude that your post is a blatant troll.
This is one major problem I see with Novell and it also paints a bad picture. Why won't Novell do this noble thing?
2- Hide it as best as possible from customers
Doesn't seem to me that they're hiding anything. They advertise nationally, both in the general media and in the trades,and have been all along. What would you do differently?
The problem is, the public wasn't buying Novell's message.
I think during the years of Novell's fall from being the leading network OS vendor, Microsoft had an unbeatable market position: we're thes convenient and safe vendor. Look how easy and spiffy our management GUI is, you can hired trained monkeys to admin your network and save a bundle. And you have to depend on us for everything else anyway, so there's no real risk. People assess risk by the information that is most conveniently at hand, which in this case was everybody else speculating how long it would take Novell to become Micrsoft roadkill. Knowledge of the risks posed by your network being run by trained monkeys driving a Ford Pinto with a glitzy paint job? Well, let's just say experience is the best teacher.
Novell's market position was a tougher sell: they produced for skilled network admins the equivalent of industrial machine tools for the skilled mechanic. And they were just about as glamorous. Of course, now things are different. If I were runnign Novell's marketing, my message would be the equivalent of saying, we're like your old steady girl friend you left for a hottie who turned out to secretly be a psychotic bitch. And by the way, we've been spending a lot of time in the gym, and your friends have been noticing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why is Novell so underrated?
They're not. At least where I am from (metro Dee-troit), a significant portion of job listings have Novell at the top.
As a side note, we wouldn't have Active Directory if it weren't for Novell coming up with something great for MS to copy. I'd really like to see IBM scoop Novell up and go up against MS again.
More
Don't be.
The Best Buy in Lincoln has been offereing the latest versions of SUSE for several years.
In 2002 I purchased SUSE 6.4 from Best Buy, for my employer, to put up a Linux server for phone download of tax return results, because the Win98 + WildCat BBS "solution" kept falling over and the MSCEs were getting tired of coming in on evenings and weekends to reboot the box. In 36 months of 24/7 operation the Linux solution, which was SUSE 6.4 with one bash script and two Python scripts each less than a page long, never crashed once and never lost a call.
Win98+WildCat TCO: $500+ for software, and about 1,000 hours of MSCE time rebooting, reinstalling, and rebuilding the Windows solution. It had to have new Pentium 3 (iirc), 512MB RAM and two 8GB hds.
Linux TCO: $38 for software and 24 hours of my time to write the scripts and test them. I had never written a Python script before that. The MSCEs gave me one of their oldest boxes, a P75 with 64MB RAM and two 1GB hds.
When asked what she thought about the KDE desktop the person who did the file maintenance said it was no different from using Win95. Her re-training costs were $0.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Agreed. I've been using it for several months now to tie in our ASP.NET apps to eDir for identity management.
I tried using the microsoft classes they provide for ldap stuff, but it's so damn Active Directory -specific that it's almost useless. Add to that the fact that you can't do things like explicit binds and I would have been rolling my own code without that ldapcsharp component.
I have found a couple of bugs working with it, but nothing show-stopping. Unfortunately their mailing list doesn't work very good: a lot of stuff shows up on their archive that never makes it to my inbox. Or people are posting to the site instead of being on the list. There just doesn't seem to enough traffic to make it useful.
I've seen a few other projects make use of it, too, like this one.
I have to agree that they can leave the impression their are hiding some of their best tech. I don't remember how I found that project, but it wasn't easy.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
No, I'm not being naive. When I saw the Netcraft listing that I erroneously cited, I wasn't surprised to see it running Windows, so I allowed myself to post the mistake. But upon correction, seeing its root webserver on Solaris/Netscape, I commented only that MS isn't as prevalent as I thought, when looking at the erroneous Netcraft entry. This isn't an "all or nothing" game, as I pointed out in my original post. It's a question of momentum, and openings for new momentum.
--
make install -not war