Novell Evolves WorkloadIQ Workload Management Products

IT experts will tell you that there is no one overwhelmingly superior set of enterprise resources, neither cloud, premises or virtual. Often firms use a mix of them to meet different needs. Even if one or two of these prove to be better, the need to utilize existing investments until they are fully written off and the cost and effort to seamlessly transition from one or both to the other make this strategy one that will be a while in being realized.

Hence intelligent workload management (IWM); it maximizes disparate existing resources securely while avoiding unnecessarily wasting money on additional ones. Hence Novell’s WorkloadIQ: its differentiated software-based approach to lead and enable the rapidly growing IWM market that is.

WorkloadIQ, announced December, 2009 is based on its ability to integrate identity and security into IT workloads, thereby giving its customers the confidence and flexibility needed to deliver IT services to end users across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Novell (News - Alert) has since shipped seven WorkloadIQ products, to date, and plans to ship five additional products before the end of December 2010.  Many customers and partners have committed to WorkloadIQ by investing in one or more of these products. And Novell has also been evolving it with new features as its popularity has increased.

While many other companies are delivering various pieces of the intelligent workload management solution set, only WorkloadIQ from Novell says the firm “offers products and services in each of the four key phases of intelligent workload management – build, secure, manage and measure.”

Here are the key features and developments in these areas:

--SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 is an operating system with more than 5,000 fully-certified applications, more than double any other Linux distribution. Within the last year Novell has expanded its virtualization strategy of being the “perfect guest” operating system that runs on hypervisors from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware, to provide customers with the greatest flexibility, performance and choice

--SUSE Appliance Toolkit and SUSE Gallery offer what Novell says is the fastest and easiest solution set for ISVs and end-users to create, test, advertise and deploy appliances and other workloads. The SUSE Studio solution has grown to more than 82,000 registered users, almost 450,000 software appliance builds and more than three million appliances downloaded. SUSE Gallery is a free-of-charge showcase for users to promote and share their software appliances, and for end users to gain access to a diversity of software appliances that run in physical, virtual and cloud environments

--Identity Manager 4 is a family of solutions that securely manages identity and access across physical, virtual and cloud environments. It is says Novell “the industry's first solution” to ensure consistent identity, security and compliance policies for an organization's entire IT ecosystem; including offering the same level of trust in the cloud that exists in the data center

--Sentinel Log Manager Appliance is the reportedly the industry’s first log management solution available as a software appliance. Built using SUSE Studio, Novell's web-based appliance building solution, Sentinel Log Manager helps customers collect and manage log data from their IT infrastructure decreasing enterprise risk and reducing the cost of compliance

--Novell Cloud Security Service (NCSS) enables cloud providers to offer customized security for their enterprise users. With NCSS enterprises can impose security policies on the cloud vendor, instead of a one-size-fits-all model

--Novell Cloud Manager, available later this year, enables companies to build a private cloud using their existing IT infrastructure, regardless of which hardware, hypervisors or operating systems they currently have in place

--PlateSpin Migrate, PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Forge support both Linux and Windows, making them reportedly the first virtualization management solutions to offer live migrations of workloads from anywhere to anywhere - physical to virtual, virtual to physical, and physical to physical - regardless of operating system platform

--ZENworks Configuration Management virtual appliance is one of what Novell says is one of the first plug-and-play solutions that integrate desktop, asset and patch management capabilities. Built using SUSE Studio and SUSE Appliance Toolkit, the ZENworks Configuration Management virtual appliance simplifies installation and reduces the support and maintenance costs associated with endpoint management

--ZENworks 11, available later this year, seamlessly integrates desktop, asset, patch, and now, endpoint security management capabilities into a single console. Combined with innovations in location awareness and power management, ZENworks 11 seamlessly manages and secures your endpoints across physical, virtual, and cloud environments while providing your end-users with the precise desktop environments and security rights they need wherever they're located, and whatever device they use

--Novell Operations Center, available later this year, is the next generation of Business Service Management. With the Novell Operations Center, customers can implement an end-to-end view of an IT service, to ensure that they are meeting service levels and commitments to the line of business

“Over the next several years, IDC (News - Alert) expects that enterprises will deploy a mix of physical, virtual and cloud computing resources,” said Mary Johnston Turner, research director for Enterprise Systems Management (News - Alert) Software at IDC. “To make the most effective use possible of this dynamic and heterogeneous infrastructure environment, IT teams will need to shift to a more policy-based, automated approach for managing the building, provisioning, migration, monitoring, measuring and securing of corporate workloads. Intelligent workload management is an emerging market concept that addresses this complex set of needs by integrating a number of important technologies.”

In addition, Novell has been working with partners across the ecosystem to enable customers to move down the path toward IWM. In June 2010, VMware announced it would distribute and support the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Customers who want to deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware in VMware vSphere virtual machines will be entitled to receive a subscription to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server at no cost that includes patches and updates as part of their newly purchased qualifying VMware vSphere license and support and subscription. VMware also announced it intends to standardize its virtual appliance-based product offerings on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

“Customers are looking for a pragmatic approach to easily and cost-effectively virtualize tier-1 applications,” said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. “Novell's WorkloadIQ helps customers transition to the cloud computing journey.”

Novell has signed significant cloud partner agreements with Amazon Web Services, Atos Origin, BasisOne, Fujitsu (News - Alert) and Vodacom Business, adding to previously announced support from ECS Technology, Gen-i, IBM, Tencent and Trustmarque. Each of these cloud vendors is using various components of the WorkloadIQ architecture to help them securely manage their cloud environments, and help their customers deploy IWM.

Novell solution providers, system integrators and services partners are also embracing the WorkloadIQ vision. Partners such as Infosys, Novacoast and Paragon Development Systems see opportunity to provide design and implementation services for their customers seeking to realize IWM.

“Customers come to us every day to ask how and where they should deploy cloud computing and from which vendor should they acquire tools to manage their expanding infrastructure,” said Angela Daniels, director, Identity-based Computing, Paragon Development Systems. “With WorkloadIQ, we have a compelling reason to recommend Novell. Only Novell integrates identity into all aspects of intelligent workload management. WorkloadIQ provides us the tools to help customers implement a secure infrastructure across physical, virtual and cloud environments.”

Customers have embraced Novell's differentiated approach to the intelligent workload management market says the firm. Early customers of WorkloadIQ include ACS (News - Alert), A Xerox Company, BC Card, Beech Grove City Schools, Burlington Coat Factory, Deutsche Flugsicherung, Essent, Europ Assistance, HSBC, Huntington National Bank, Johnsonville Sausage, National Vision, Synovus Financial, Toll Brothers, U.S. Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command, University of Dayton and Vancouver Convention Centre.  All are already implementing many elements of WorkloadIQ to move down the path of – and benefit from –IWM.

“Novell's strategy is to work with our partners to help customers solve a point problem today, with the promise of reaching intelligent workload management tomorrow,” said Richard Whitehead, recently appointed director of Intelligent Workload Management at Novell. “For example, with Novell Identity Manager 4, a customer can manage identity policy consistently across physical, virtual and cloud environments. When that customer eventually deploys Novell Cloud Manager, he or she can now build a private cloud using existing data center assets. Each product solves a specific customer pain point. However, when used in conjunction, these two products enable a customer to securely manage their IT services in physical, virtual and cloud environments, and optimize their computing resources.”