Novell Delivers Workload Automation Strategy, Tools

Novell’s business expertise spans a number of different technology arenas, from Linux, business services management and virtualization products to security.

The company is now revealing its strategy that holds all of these together.

The concept is to equip enterprises with the combined tools that are necessary for security, management, and delivery of both virtual and physical workloads across datacenters and in enterprises, not the mention the cloud.

The strategy is one that Novell has been hinting at for a while now, especially since it struggled financially around the time of the last Global Financial Crisis.

CMO John Dragoon says, “we think that intelligent workload management is the answer to addressing concerns around security, performance management and availability, and getting clients to address the paradox of trying to control their own environments and make it more responsive at the same time.”

One significant part of Novell’s strategy is to leverage its appliance-building service, SUSE Studio, that it released a little while ago.

SUSE Studio allows users to build their own software appliances based around Linux, that they can use either online, or physically.

Dragoon explained that Novell is going to expand the SUSE Studio to incorporate an appliance toolkit and Novell workshop applications.

“The appliance toolkit is a suite of tools and that’s about making it so enterprises can build and leverage appliances while improving the efficiency of both deployment and maintenance,” Dragoon explained.

The toolkit is set up to support both virtual and physical instances and will include updating capabilities, as well as configuration and access management.

The Novell workshop application is designed to help edit intelligent workloads.

As far as Dragoon is concerned, it is going to help enterprises edit workloads with embedded management, security and compliance for both Windows and Linux workloads.

The idea of using appliance-building technology is definitely not an original Linux idea. rPath, a Linux appliance pioneer is now using its technology with a datacenter automation solution.

The solution is not necessarily about overall workload management, but instead is focused on automating the method that operating systems and datacenter applications use, manage and maintain.

The foundation of intelligent workload management is SUSE Studio, but Novell still plans to take a relatively agnostic approach in terms of the workload operating systems that it uses, so that it can manage multiple environments including Windows and Linux.

When it comes to the security side of things, Novell plans on building on its existing offerings for workload identity awareness.

When it comes to managing the virtual side, Novell is going to make the most of the assets that it garnered from PlateSpin.

Novell’s workload strategy is something that’s going to change and evolve over time.

Dragoon explained, “we need to get customers to understand that this is not some long-term vision they have to wait for but they can start today.

Most workloads today are still physical, a lot of companies tend to run to the cloud part of the conversation because it’s the sexiest, but there is pragmatic work to be delivered across the continuum whether it’s internal or external.

We want people to understand that when and if they’re ready to deploy and work across whatever computing platform, Novell should be part of that conversation.”

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