Alan Nugent kicked off the keynote … and the microphones wouldn’t
work. They eventually ran a new mic out to him and he got
going. He indicated that this was the “techy” keynote, with a lot
of demos … he then went into some background information.

He offered his perspectives of the core points of Technology Strategies

• Devotion to Customer Satisfaction
• Focus (know your limitations)
• Compliments and substitutes
• Temporal Constraints (2-4 years)
• Forward, into the past

I like these in general.  Obviously, committment to customers
is the primary goal … they are the ones paying for solutions. 
The rest are also fairly obvious …

He also offered some “General Trends” …

• Customization
• Commoditization
• Consolidation./Convergence
• Consistancy
• Complexity
• Compliance (Regulatory)

He then reviewed “What does it mean to Novell?”

• Support/Facilitate customization/personalization
• Embrace Commoditization
• Drive and Manage consolidation
• Reduce complexity and risk
• Increase Predictability

Under his command, the office of the CTO is looking at the following areas:

• Open Source and Linux
• Wireless
• Grid Computing
• Wireless Grids
• “Autonomous” Computing
• Virtualization
• Service Oriented Architectures
• Trusted Computing
• Identity-based Computing
• Context-based Computing

He then said that he would focus on things that are really being worked
on …even if only in an investigation stage. He then showed a
slide of “Ubiquitous Linux”. After completing a quick brush of
this slide, he showed an intro SGI video and introduced Rich Altmaier,
VP of Storage and Software at SGI.  Interesting partner …

Rich began by introducing the SGI solution for it’s markets. He
talked about their Numaflex architecture, and adoption of the Linux
kernel. He indicated that the are using the Intel Itanium – “the
fastest processor on the planet.” He then walked down on the
floor to show one of the SGI 3000(?) machines. One of the VPs
from SuSE then began a demo using ‘linpack’ benchmark running 32 and 64
threads … and he showed a bunch of graphs showing activity … uh,
not that impressive since most people probably don’t get the context of
what is occuring. Wow … SGI is done … he left. That was really short …

The SuSE VP then went through what is coming in SuSE Linux 9.1 …
Linux Kernel v2.6, KDE 3.2.1, GNOME 2.4.2, OpenOffice 1.1, KDevelop
3.0, SLP support, and support for Intel and AMD (32 and 64 bit)
processors. Note that everything listed (except for the Linux v2.6 kernel) is all UNIX-compatible software.

Cluster Resources, Inc. – a Utah company – came on stage to talk about TeraGrid, and grid
computing. They demonstrated their software, submitted a job into
TeraGrid, and explained some of the optimizations and resource choices
that are made to pick the appropriate. He indicated that they are
now using Red Carpet to automatically deploy the resources to be able
to run any particular application. This is much like what we have
been working with in our Application Substrate.

Nugent then introduced the Chief Architect of Xiotech, Rob
Peglar. He talked about Storage Clustering and Future Storage
Design. Ok … he had some good examples of the evolution of
storage and storage networks … his “jokes” were a little weak. 😉 Ugh … the
jokes are continuing …

He is showing (in between the “jokes”) a variety of Storage
Clustering
architectures. These are very similar to the types of storage
systems that I was working with as Chase Manahatten. He expanded
to touch on clustering in general … and leading to grid
computing. They are unifying much of their architecture around
directories and LDAP. He mentioned that “CPUs are peripherals”
… an interesting concept.  His point is that “memory” is where
the data is … and that CPUs are just peripherals that manipulate
memory.

Robert Wipfel from Novell then came on stage. I worked with
Robert for years while at Novell and he is an amazingly bright guy when
it comes to clustering. They again emphasized their adoption of
CIM from the DMTF … and are showing a demo of extending a filesystem
in real-time, while mounted and in use, based on the disk free space
exceeding a threshold. This *is* the future of storage systems
… where you will add bulk disk to a storage network, and have it
allocated to servers on-demand. There are numerous vendors providing
this type of solution. They went on to show a cluster failover
demo.

Miguel and Erik showed up to do the Mono demo. They indicated
that their objective was to improve Linux developer productivity, and
ease application migration. Miguel went through the current
Mono stack and architecture, and talked about the .NET libs that they
currently have. He then went on to create a very simple app, and
showed it running on SuSE and Windows. He is going to expand the
demo using Glade … he’s doing his browser demo again. This time
he showed some of the power of this environment, icluding the language
support. He talked about this being a part of the power of using
the stock components. Erik then showed off their “Wiki-Doc” for
Mono … this is a very good idea for docs and how to allow for
contributions to documentation … so it’s “Open Source” docs … not
just code. Miguel then showed the SOAP/Web Services capabilities built into the .ASP server.

Nugent then showed the Novell Student Videos winners.

Then up came
Ed Reed … I forgot that he had returned to Novell. He is now a
part of the Office of the CTO working on security. He showed the
ability of the Linux Security Module capabilities of the v2.6 kernel to load “policies” to restrict what can be done on a system .

Martin Buckley came up to show a Windows 98 to SuSE Dektop
migration. There were numerous issues that were not addressed …
but the overall migration demo was impressive.

They went into the drawing for the Segway … and that is the end of the keynote!