Novell has unveiled the first offerings of its
desktop-to-datacentre management initiative, which aims to
facilitate better management of virtual machines, high-performance
computing and other IT resources.
Following the agreement with Microsoft in November 2006, these
offerings are the next steps in Novell’s plan to deliver on its
vision of interoperable, cross-platform management solutions.
Novell says that its systems management solutions provide open
standards-based management that covers the entire enterprise IT
environment and helps customers maximise the value of their
technology infrastructure.
Putting its move into context, Novell says that as companies
adopt new technologies - such as Linux, open source and
virtualisation - they gain performance and cost benefits but can
face an extra level of management complexity. The four new
solutions that come from the Novell ZENworks systems and resource
management family are designed to address these concerns.
The solutions, insists their maker, provide a complete set of
integrated ITIL-based services that automate management across
diverse server and client platforms for both physical and virtual
environments. These manage and schedule heterogeneous virtual
machine deployments, including Xen virtualisation on Linux and
automated load balancing
of these machines.
As part of plans to increase the strategic use of available
resources, these solutions use policy-based orchestration to
schedule jobs, reserve resources in advance, dynamically
re-prioritise resources to meet service demands and learn to
provision resources proactively.
“Companies today are looking to virtual machines as one way of
consolidating servers - saving power and space - and increasing the
efficiency of their IT investments,” comments Ronni Colville,
research vice-president at Gartner. “However, while virtualisation
can reduce the physical requirements of the datacentre, it can also
compound the level of management complexity. To maximise their
computing potential in the datacentre, customers need
cross-platform systems management solutions for both virtual
machines and physical machines.”