Dell’s OEM Solutions division today said it will offer customized SUSE Linux Enterprise servers to customers. But the far more interesting nugget of information for partners involves SUSE Studio, which Dell will use to build and deploy customized Linux application stacks. Here’s why.

For channel partners, the Dell-SUSE relationship is worth watching. It has been about a year since Attachmate acquired Novell and SUSE Linux. In recent months, SUSE — essentially a division of Attachmate — has scored multiple wins with Dell. First came a cloud computing relationship between Dell and SUSE, which involves VMware. Now comes the SUSE-Dell OEM agreement.

Smart SUSE Move

Keep a close eye on SUSE Studio, one of the best gifts Novell executives offered the Linux community before selling the company to Attachmate.

Generally speaking, SUSE Studio has allowed third-party ISVs (independent software vendors) to rapidly build application stacks on SUSE Linux. Most of the chatter around SUSE Studio has involved so-called software appliances, which can ease application deployments for channel partners and customers.

No doubt, Dell has relationships with multiple Linux distributions — including SUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Canonical Ubuntu. But SUSE apparently is the “first Linux vendor” in the Dell OEM Technology Partner program.

Sort of makes you wonder: Is something deeper brewing between Dell and SUSE? Hmmm…

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2 Comments on “Dell Servers Embrace SUSE Linux, But SUSE Studio Is Real Story”

  1. Bill Bickel Says:
    January 24th, 2012 at 11:13 pm

    I don’t think the cloud gold rush will be kind to Dell, at least on the side of being a cloud provider. I give them great credit for creating a solid server offering and brand (above the white-box servers in quality and service, and better price/performance than IBM or HP), and continuing to sell millions of desktops and laptops (and capitalizing on HP’s mis-steps in the last 12-24 months).

    But I can’t see Dell being able to compete with Amazon, Rackspace, or the IBM, NTT, AT&T and Savvis types of the world in cloud services. I don’t see them being able to carve off enough to invest, and I think it would take a lot of marketing dollars to even get people to kick the tires.

    So count me as skeptical here. Also having Suse as the main or first Linux offering seems a bit misguided. I have not heard Suse being the choice of cloud-generation developers (that seems more like Ubuntu, Red Hat, or Red Hat knock-offs). Or maybe Microsoft has some say in this since they have that Linux partner arrangement with Suse.

    For that matter I don’t think HP can be successful widely as a cloud provider either, and I am hearing that the inside strategy group around HP’s cloud is fairly messed up.

    I will check in 12-18 months and see if Dell still has a cloud offering, or if they have decided they have to buy something that has a better position in the space to be a player.

  2. Mike Says:
    January 25th, 2012 at 8:42 pm

    @Bill No offense, but I think you missed a key point of the article…to TVG’s point, SUSE Studio is a really cool tool, and a free one at that. Definitely worth checking out.

    It’s merely a hosted website which allows you to build up a customized Linux image (SLES/openSUSE-based), including all dependency checking, linking to your own update servers, adding your own applications/images/data, even setting up your database instances, so that you can deploy a fully operational and customized images for a myriad of uses (appliances, server image, desktop, Amazon Cloud server, etc.).

    And it can deliver those images in a variety of forms (USB, LiveCD/DVD, ISO, Amazon EC2, OVF, VMDK, Xen Guest…you can even test drive your image live via the web browser before you download it.

    Apparently the site only requires you to create a login to start building images. And while I have multiple distros in my environment, this will definitely make building up my SUSE images *much* easier, and in fact, will probably be my “go-to” tool for my non-distro-specific linux servers too.

    As a side note, I got turned onto the openSUSE Open Build Service a while back too. It also is a tremendous help to any Systems Manager. It allows you to build up packages/RPMs for multiple distros simultaneously, including Fedora, RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu…so if you’re like me, and have some packages you’ve created internally (for config files and/or software), it’s a life-saver.

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