Open Enterprise Server
Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES) is a network software product by Novell, Inc. It provides Novell NetWare, SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server and a set of networking services (file, print, directory, clustering, storage, network and server management, web applications, etc.) available on top of either of the two kernels - Linux and NetWare. The product was designed to enable both OSes to play well with each other so that customers can deploy a mix of the two that suits their needs, even mixed clusters in which resources failback from a NetWare server to a Linux server and vice-versa.
OES is Novell's reaction to 2 things:
- the increased significance of open-source in the company strategy
- the fact that it lost a lot of market share not because the customers were dissatisfied with the quality of its networking services (usually it was just the opposite), but mostly because these services ran almost exclusively on top of an OS that was narrowly specialized in its initial design and didn't get as strong support from ISVs as most of its competitors. Novell executives, as well as most analizers, claim that porting these services to an OS with growing popularity and better support from hardware and software vendors gives Novell a good opportunity to improve its business results.
OES was released in March 2005 and contained NetWare 6.5 SP3 and SLES 9 SP1.
OES SP1, released in September 2005, was based on Netware 6.5 SP4 and SLES 9 SP2.