Novell launches first 'desktop-to-data centre' management solutions that deliver on interoperable, cross-platform vision

Novell has announced the first offerings of its desktop-to-data centre management initiative, including the availability of a comprehensive set of solutions which orchestrate the management of virtual machines, high-performance computing and other IT resources.

Following the agreement with Microsoft earlier this month, these offerings are the next steps in Novell's plan to deliver on its vision of interoperable, cross-platform management solutions.

Systems management solutions from Novell provide open standards-based management that covers the entire enterprise IT environment, from Linux to Unix to Windows, and helps customers maximise the value of their technology infrastructure. These solutions are also well positioned to help organisations more closely align IT to their business needs, control costs and minimise their risks.

As organisations adopt new technologies, including Linux, open source and virtualisation, they gain performance and cost benefits but can face an additional level of management complexity. Four new solutions from the Novell ZENworks systems and resource management family 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 systems management solutions from Novell now manage and schedule heterogeneous virtual machine deployments, including Xen virtualisation on Linux, and automate the load balancing of these machines. To increase the strategic use of available resources, these new solutions use policy-based orchestration to schedule jobs, reserve resources in advance, dynamically re-prioritise resources to meet service demands, and learn to proactively provision or deprovision resources.

"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," said Ronni Colville, research vice-president at Gartner. "However, while virtualisation can reduce the physical requirements of the data centre, it can also compound the level of management complexity. To maximise their computing potential in the data centre, customers need cross-platform systems management solutions for both virtual machines and physical machines."

With these new ZENworks solutions, customers can automate IT data centre operations using dynamic, policy-driven solutions that ensure security and compliance, eliminate administrator effort and enable total control over their IT environment from the desktop to the data centre.

* Novell ZENworks Orchestrator serves as the 'brain' that allows for policy-based automation. Unlike other management products, ZENworks Orchestrator takes a heuristic approach to learn from previous events and resource demands.
* Novell ZENworks Virtual Machine Management gives organisations the ability to confidently employ virtualisation in their data centres, whether running on Linux, Unix or Windows machines. From VMware to Microsoft to Xen virtualisation environments, this policy-based solution automates the process of deploying and managing virtual data centre assets, as well as dynamically provisioning workloads and ensuring business continuity. This solution also manages virtualised environments in Novell Open Enterprise Server.
* Novell ZENworks HPC Management provides grid-based management of Java applications and enables workloads to be distributed for parallel execution. This includes automated high-performance multicast data distribution which can move and copy large volumes of data to remote resources for processing.
* Novell ZENworks 7.5 Asset Management, the only product on the market that runs readiness reports for both Windows Vista and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 from Novell, helps customers to control and manage their IT infrastructure with a clear and complete picture of their asset environment.

Allison Singh, systems engineering manager at Novell SA, said: "The latest Novell ZENworks management solutions are aimed squarely at answering customer calls for interoperable solutions. Novell ZENworks Orchestrator and Virtual Machine Management allow organisations to leverage the power of virtualisation and increase the performance of their IT investments. These two solutions, complemented by ZENworks HPC Management and ZENworks 7.5 Asset Management, put customers in control of their computing resources, while reducing the costs and simplifying the management of their desktops and data centres."

Industry partners are expressing their support and commitment to Novell's vision of interoperable, cross-platform solutions that help the customer manage and maximise their IT investment.

"Virtualisation offers organisations many key IT benefits including simpler deployment and more efficient use of computing resources," said Terri Hall, vice-president of Software Alliances and Solutions for AMD. "Having worked with the open source community to deliver virtualisation to the enterprise market, AMD is pleased to see Novell deliver new cross-platform management solutions designed to accelerate the adoption of virtualisation and maximise system performance."

"We partner with Novell because they share our vision of driving standards," said Subo Guha, director of Dell software marketing. "Novell's systems and resource management solutions leverage open standards to manage heterogeneous virtual and physical machines which simplifies operations and improves utilisation. Novell is helping to create scalable and interoperable building blocks that allow customers to cost-effectively implement server virtualisation across their enterprises."

For more information about Novell's desktop-to-data centre management initiative, go to http://www.novell.com/dca.