8 April 2010 NDS8 Creates New VMware Division

As a result of continued demand from our customers, NDS8 has now created a VMware division within the company.  NDS8 has recruited experienced and accredited consultants in Scotland and England which are now assisting customers with their requirements.

NDS8 will continue to invest in this area and continues to look for more consultants who can demonstrate the expertise and experience which will add value to our customers.

VMware is a global leader in Infrastructure Virtualisation and this new capability will help NDS8 deliver more cost effective, agile and resilient infrastructure solutions to the market

8 April 2010 NDS8 Appoints New Business Development Manager in London

In order to better serve our customers in the South, NDS8 has appointed a new Business Development Manager based in London.  This appointment adds to the three recent appointments of technical consultants in the South of England.

 

13 August 2009 RCPE and Astaro Story went well...

Astaro put out the following release - seems to have reappeared on a lot of security sites.

The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (RCPE) has implemented Astaro's all-in-one security appliances to safeguard the College's IT infrastructure and significantly reduce the time spent by the IT team on email management.

The RCPE is a professional membership organisation representing over 10,000 medical professionals worldwide, and uses email as a core communication channel with members.  The College had relied on its ISP to manage its anti-spam and anti-virus solutions but found that the security system in place was also impacting the delivery of legitimate traffic.

Using the Astaro Security Gateway appliances, the College now has the ability to easily manage its anti-spam and anti-virus services in-house and has established a finely tuned system for identifying email security threats. "Previously, we were seeing too many false positives in our spam, where legitimate email traffic would not get through. The filters would be sent over to the IT team, where we would have to wade through to find any legitimate emails, which took up a lot of our resources. With Astaro, the number of false positives has been reduced to almost zero, while individual users can now check their own spam email lists as well. We estimate that we have reduced the amount of time spent on managing spam by around 95 percent, which removes a significant burden from the IT team. We also have greater control over the security set-up if we require it," explained Inez Hyde, IT Manager at the RCPE.

The two Astaro ASG 220 UTM appliances also replace the College's previous Novell BorderManager firewall, which was approaching its end of life date. Hyde added, "We decided to look at alternatives to the Novell product that could provide the College with a cost-effective, more comprehensive security platform and that would be easy to manage in the longer term. Working with our IT partner NDS8, the Astaro UTM appliances were deployed quickly and provide us with all that we need to keep the College secure. Overall, we are extremely happy with the Astaro solution."

6 August 2009 Novell Success Story - Tangible Group

 

With a small IT department servicing a large number of users, Tangible Group wanted a standardised, centrally controlled e-mail infrastructure that would be easy to manage—but with companies in the group using Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise, administration was complex.

Tangible Group decided to upgrade to the latest version of Novell GroupWise—taking advantage of significant improvements to the Mac and Linux clients, as well as more advanced calendaring features. As users of Novell GroupWise for almost eight years, Tangible Group was confident when its long-time IT partner NDS8, a Novell Platinum PartnerSM, recommended the upgrade.

Collaboration is central to Tangible Group's success, and Novell GroupWise has enabled enormous improvements in this area.

"The external calendar feature has made our personal assistants' lives much easier, as they can now organise complicated schedules more easily," said Watson. "Equally, the ability to customise personal dashboards means employees can tailor the user interface to suit their preferences and maximise productivity."

The ability to manage the Novell GroupWise servers remotely means that if problems occur, the Tangible Group IT department can respond swiftly and efficiently without the inconvenience and cost of travelling to another site.

 

5 August 2009 Novell GroupWise and teaming offer

 

1) 33% Upgrade Discount + Novell Teaming for $1

Customers with older versions of GroupWise or Novell Open Workgroup Suite can take advantage of a 33% discount on upgrade licenses and purchase Novell Teaming 2 for only $1 USD per license (requires the purchase of one year of maintenance).

2) Novell Teaming for $1 for Current GroupWise 8 Customers

As a loyalty reward, existing GroupWise 8 customers are also eligible to purchase the newly released Novell Teaming 2 for only $1 USD per license (requires the purchase of one year of maintenance).

3) End-User Training for $8 Per User

To ensure that end users are ready to take advantage of all the productivity-enhancing features of Novell GroupWise 8, any organisation that has upgraded with maintenance by October 31, 2009 can access 10 hours of computer-based training for just $8 per user.

4 August 2009 OES2 Upgrade offer

 

1) 33% Upgrade Discount

NetWare or Open Enterprise Server 1 customers without maintenance can save 33% on upgrade licenses. A comparable discount is available for customers who purchased Open Enterprise Server via the Novell Open Workgroup Suite.

2) Free Training

To address one of the biggest barriers to upgrades, Novell are offering even more free training. In addition to the existing free On-demand “Bridging Skills from NetWare to Open Enterprise Server” course, customers can take advantage of a new “Linux Fundamentals” On-demand course free of charge. VLA customers who purchase 250 or more upgrade licenses will also receive a voucher for one free seat in an instructor-led training course in their area.

Also Available: Free Extended Support

Remember, also, that while we believe the highest value to NetWare customers is realised through deploying their file and print services on Linux, we understand that some customers cannot undertake an upgrade right now. For these customers who remain current on maintenance, Novell will be offering free extended support for two years beyond the NetWare end-of-general-support date, or through to March 2012.

23 July 2009 US Educational Training

 

While in the US, NDS8 ran the first Novell Cluster Services on OES2 training in Novell's main building in Provo.  With 8 attendees, all from academic sites, including one overseas, worked through two concentrated days of training.

Building upon the knowledge of NetWare and Clustering the course covered creating clusters, building additional nodes, resources and services.  The creation and clustering of a complete GroupWise system was the final climax of the course.

Watch this space, but Novell and NDS8 are currently collaborating on what happens to this course next.

21 July 2009 NDS8 present at the TTP 2009

 

Following the success of theLinux clustering demonstration in Regensburg in 2008, NDS8's Tim and Mark show presented at the TTP in Provo this July.

The subjects in question this time were:

 A TTP Success Story - Getting noatime into NSS

 Novell Business Continuity Clusters

 SLES 11, Virtualisation & NPIV

 The whole of the TTP meeting was a success with the largest number of attendees seen in years!

 

10 July 2009 Another GroupWise upgrade completed

 

Just a quick note, NDS8 have just completed yet another upgrade of an Exchange site to GroupWise.

In this case we upgraded 350 users from Exchange 2003 to GroupWise 8 for a pharmaceutical subsidiary of a global company.

Two more planned for later this year, do I hear any more offers..?

 

 

5 December 2008 NDS8 Sponsors Mindworks events in Bracknell

        NDS8 have teamed up with Mindworks UK limited, the training and event management company behind Dr Peter Atkins to provide indepth review of both the Novell view on Infrastructure and the Novell IDM solution.

 

The Infrastructure event will cover OES2 SP1, GroupWise 8, Clustering, Business Continuity Clustering, Sentinel, SuSE Linix 10 with AppArmor, Using IP Tables for an effective firewall, Teaming + Conferencing and others.  Of particular note is Domain Services for Windows - Active Directory emulation useing eDirectory - a solution that has been praised by Microsoft at the recent launch of OES2 SP1.  The Infrastructure event will be on the 2nd and 3rd of December

 

The IDM event will cover how Novells product suite can assit with Local Government CoCo initutives, Single Sign-on, Shibboleth and development best practices.  A review of the past and the planned futures will also be covered.    The IDM event will also take place in Bracknell, but held on the 9th and 10th of December 

9 October 2008 NDS8 Sponsors Novell Data Centre Tour

Novell Platinum Partner, NDS8, is sponsoring the Novell Data Centre Road Show in Edinburgh on November 11th at the Norton House Hotel.

Among the topics will be a key note speech from John Stetic, co-founder of Plate Spin which was recently bought by Novell; Open Source Virtualistaion and Windows server Consolidation; and the benefits of SAP-certfied virtualisation.

"The Road Show is a real opportunity for IT Directors and Managers to not only hear but also experience a more intelligent approach to data centres" said Tim Heywood, NDS8 founder and Novell SYSOp.

To book your place or find out more please click here.

25 September 2008 Computer Weekly Article: De Montfort University has chosen Novell Open Enterprise Server 2

De Montfort University has chosen Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 as the foundation for its IT infrastructure for students and staff. The Novell system, built on the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server SP1 operating system, is designed to reduce storage costs, and using Novell's Xen virtualisation technology, improve resilience and flexibility.  To read the article in full click on the link below:

Computer Weekly 

NDS8 worked closely with Novell's OES product team on this project, which was the first OES2 deployment in the UK.  This project helped to define the way that Novell Cluster Services and Dynamic Storage Technology interact together making it much easier to deploy in a clustered environment.