Last week, IT solutions provider Novell, unveiled a marketing strategy for what it is calling a “Service-Driven Data Center”. The plan includes a line of integrated products the company says is custom designed to help clients enhance their agility while reducing complexity, risks and costs. This concept is Novell’s latest move towards delivering more service-driven and business-centric IT solutions.
According to Novell, the new solutions will provide services designed to create, manage and effectively measure an advanced data center that enables IT executives to deliver flexible, cost efficient business services to their customers. The plan is said to couple the SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Server platform with the recently acquired ManagedObjects and PlatSpin in the company’s portfolio of integrated products.
The Service Driven Data Center has been set to function in a heterogeneous environment. It utilizes management and automation tools to measure the performance of complete IT services against their business objectives. Novell’s concept is based on the following core values:
Build
Build is the company’s dedication to creating a flexible, highly efficient data center using SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 as its platform.
Manage
The manage characteristic relates to a holistic approach to virtualization and workload management. This is made possible by using PlateSpin Workload Management solutions to leverage the company’s assets.
Measure
Lastly, the Measure aspect refers to the utilization of ManagedObjects, which provides business service management across multiple platforms and hardware types.
Released in March, 2009, Novell’s SUSE platform offers open-source benefits of the Linux environment along with enterprise features such as support for Xen virtual machines and Microsoft Management Tools. It also offers a level of scalability that allows customers to run an unlimited amount of virtual machines. This past February, SoftLayer Technologies made a similar move by adding SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to its line of server operating systems.
Reps at Novell say the solutions allow customers to maximize the utilization of their IT assets within a compliant and secure framework, enabling those who have plans of running a server farm, building an internal cloud or leveraging an external cloud. Jeff Jaffe, Novell chief technology office and executive VP of business units, says that the company has received helpful feedback from a number of customers and partners. The one thing they heard the most is that IT exists to deliver services to meet business demands. Jaffe says Novella is confident that the new solutions are what IT teams need to meet those demands.
The news of Novell’s vision for its data center comes at a time when several of the industry’s key players are making announcement to gain a competitive edge in the very lucrative data center market. Just last month, Cisco revealed Unified Computing System, a new data center strategy that unifies server, network, storage and virtualization resources into one energy efficient system. Ironically, Sun Microsystems recently turned down a $7 billion acquisition offer from computer giant IBM. It is reported that the move would have improved Sun’s infrastructure to compete with market rivals like Hewlett Packard.
