Novell to Focus on the `Agile Infrastructure`

SALT LAKE CITY—Novell's vision for the future is the agile infrastructure, and the company has a new project code-named Fossa to address this plan, which will include both open-source and proprietary software.

"CIOs want agility, yet IT infrastructure is anything but agile today. So that is Novell's vision for the future: the agile infrastructure, and we will be working on this with the open-source community and our partners," Chief Technology Officer Jeff Jaffe said during his keynote here March 17.

Novell code-named the project Fossa after the agile animal living in the jungles of Madagascar, which is closely related to the mongoose, and that has no known predators, he said. He added that Fossa will also invest in proprietary technologies to fill the gaps in open-source software.

"The Fossa project is the next generation infrastructure to deliver an agile infrastructure and aligned with our strategy. It will be able to execute with agility, using high bandwidth, execute effectively through policies, while agility will be automated through algorithms that allow the optimization and provisioning of these workloads," he said.

Novell has shipped its MonoDevelop, a development environment for Mono. Click here to read more. 

 Novell's agility focus is also based on a huge amount of work already done inside the company over many years, and a lot of that agility would come from policy and identity management, Jaffe said. "We are building on a lot of technology we already have and we are certainly not lagging behind what our competitors already offer."

As one blog noted, Fossa "(just about) stands for 'Free and Open Source Software with Agility', because the goal of the Fossa Project is to make computing tasks across a business work better and smarter across businesses."

Unified communications was also helping set the IT agenda, and all of this needed to be brought into the compute infrastructure, Jaffe said.

Linux is also at the core of its virtualization strategy, and Jaffee said Novell would be showing Windows Server 2008 running virtualized on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 later this week here at BrainShare.

"Linux will be everywhere going forward, and will be a core component of the Fossa project, which is also closely aligned to our strategic goals and your strategic needs," he said.