Novell moves to allay cloud and virtualisation fears

Novell aims at discipline of Intelligent Workload Management

Novell has announced a new technology roadmap and coined a new three-letter acronym - intelligent workload management (IWM).

The company will launch a series of middleware products throughout 2010 and 2011 to put the roadmap into play.

The strategy comes from how the firm thinks its customers will deal with the growing trends for virtualisation and cloud computing in the future, explained Novell chief executive Ron Hovsepian, defining a workload as, "the middleware that supports [an] application and the operating system."

"The common theme is heterogeneity, compliance and security across our approach," said Hovsepian.

IWM is more than managing virtual systems securely and making sure the application performance is sufficient, Hovsepian said. "[IWM is] moving from a dumb workload with a management framework, to an intelligent workload with the management elements built into the workload."

"[The workload] will be able to move freely in the virtualised world, on-premise or off-premise," he added.

"We think IWM will help companies leverage their existing IT assets, realise the significant cost benefits offered by new models like virtualisation and cloud computing, "and provide them with the necessary tools to secure information as it moves inside and outside the organisation," said Hovsepian.

Security and performance are certainly at the top of CIOs' worries when it comes to cloud computing and virtualisation. A recent IDC CXO poll showed that 89 per cent of CXOs highlighted security as the number one issue, with 88 per cent highlighting performance management as the second issue.

Over the next 18 months, Novell will introduce five products to allay these fears.

Novell's Appliance Workshop will be used to build workloads in virtual machine file formats, such as Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESX, and Citrix Xen formats.

To secure the workloads, in Q2 2010 Novell will ship Cloud Security Service. "This will allow enterprises to enforce their own identity and security protocols on anybody's Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud or hosted environment, " Hovsepian said.

At the same time Novell will ship Identity Manager 4, allowing fine-grained access and control for individuals and groups, whether on-premise or in the cloud.

Managing workloads will be accomplished using Platespin Atlantic, to be launched in Q3 2010, which allows customers to build a 'self-service' provisioning system, usable across multiple environments and frameworks.

The final part of the roadmap is the ability to measure the performance and compliance of workloads. In Q3 2010 Novell will ship Business Service Management, allowing IT executives to measure compliance and performance from a console.

"Business Service Management will also be able to optimise the workloads, but allow [IT executives] to get real-time system alerts about compliance rather than a week later, when they'd have to plough through to see where they're out of compliance," said Hovsepian.

Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a $6.5 billion outsourcer with 12 datacentres is rolling out the IWM strategy. Novell has also partnered with SAP, VMware and IT shops such as Deloitte & Touche, Infosys and Atos Origin.