Novell announced the availability of SUSE Manager, the most advanced systems management solution for enterprise Linux environments. Designed for managing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and other Linux distributions across physical, virtual and cloud environments, SUSE Manager reduces the total cost of ownership of Linux deployments, even as they become larger and more sophisticated.

SUSE Manager also simplifies migrations from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, helping organizations benefit from greater application availability, mission-critical capabilities and technical support quality.

"As the Linux market matures and Linux growth in the data center continues, customers require standardized, easy-to-use tools to perform a core set of Linux systems management functions," said Tim Grieser, Program Vice President, Enterprise System Management Software at IDC. "To maximize their Linux investments, IT organizations must utilize management products that are optimized to work in Linux environments and use logic and terminology familiar to Linux administrators. Open source solutions, such as SUSE Manager, are advancing the development of standardized Linux management solutions."

SUSE Manager, which is based on the open source project Spacewalk, provides automated and cost-effective software, update and asset management, as well as system provisioning and monitoring capabilities. With SUSE Manager, enterprises can reduce the operational costs of their Linux servers while improving compliance and service quality.

SUSE Manager helps enterprise customers:

* Reduce total cost of ownership: Administrators manage systems more efficiently by automating systems management and provisioning tasks, thus optimizing their Linux deployments while reducing management effort. For instance, SUSE Manager includes the industry-leading Zypp package management stack, which provides the fastest and most efficient Linux updating.

* Minimize complexity of managing Linux systems: IT teams can manage Linux deployments from a single console across multiple hardware architectures, virtual platforms and cloud environments, including IBM System z and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server-based appliances. This enables them to optimize the placement of workloads with respect to performance, availability and cost, all without losing control.

* Improve service quality to line of business: IT professionals can perform management and provisioning tasks faster and with fewer errors, reducing server downtime. Integrated monitoring allows administrators to identify performance issues early, further reducing service disruption.

* Ease migration to SUSE Linux Enterprise from Red Hat Enterprise Linux: SUSE Manager delivers best-in-class management of both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, enabling customers to manage existing Red Hat servers while migrating workloads to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Organizations using Red Hat Network Satellite can transition to SUSE Manager while retaining all data, configurations, customized scripts, templates and processes.