Novell's cloud management solution is hypervisor agnostic and offers a built-in connector to Novell Sentinel.
Computer management services specialist Novell announced the
availability of Cloud Manager, a solution designed to enable customers
to create and securely manage a cloud computing environment as an
extension of existing data center resources. Cloud Manager is designed
for the heterogeneous reality of most IT environments, which the
company said gives users the freedom and flexibility to create and
manage private clouds which support all leading hypervisors, operating
systems and hardware platforms.
Built from the ground up as a cloud computing management platform,
Cloud Manager offers a single console that all business unit leaders,
application teams and IT management can use to request, approve, manage
and report on IT services across their infrastructure. It is
hypervisor-agnostic, which Novell said is becoming more important as
today's enterprises increasingly deploy a mix of hypervisors in their
data centers.
"Cloud Manager will simplify our IT service provisioning by enabling us
to treat our physical resources and virtual infrastructure as a
seamless private cloud and gain a much clearer and more granular
understanding of our IT use and costs," said Ryan Klose, chief
information officer of Premium Wine Brands for Pernod Ricard. "Working
with AkurIT, our Novell business partner, who implemented the virtual
infrastructure and Cloud Manager, our BIS Infrastructure team can be
more responsive to changing business priorities. Cloud Manager allows
us to simplify and automate many of our business processes, accelerate
IT service delivery as well as provide visibility and cost transparency
to the business. Strategically, this will provide us with a competitive
edge."
Features include automatic creation and deployment of workloads into
the virtual environment based on a service catalog of predefined
workload templates, security profiles that can be configured at the
user, group, workload and business service levels, a built-in connector
to Novell Sentinel that allows security managers to correlate events
from Cloud Manager with other events detected in the cloud or any other
Sentinel-aware location and support for a range of industry hypervisors
and operating systems, such as VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and
open source Xen; operating systems including SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server, Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
"Customers want to be able to securely manage cloud environments as a
seamless extension of their existing data center, and they are looking
for solutions that avoid vendor lock-in and interoperate across a broad
range of technology stacks," said Jim Ebzery, senior vice president and
general manager of security, management and operating platforms at
Novell. "We've optimized Cloud Manager for the heterogeneous reality of
most IT environments, delivering on the promised flexibility and
agility of cloud computing and providing the rich management
capabilities IT administrators need. Further, Novell can offer
credibility, breadth of portfolio, award-winning support and strong
industry relationships to customers, partners and service providers."
In a recent survey of more than 200 IT professionals at large
enterprises, conducted by Harris Interactive and sponsored by Novell,
89 percent of respondents said they saw private clouds as the next
logical stop for organizations already using virtualization and 93
percent feel private cloud platforms should offer a management
framework that can span a heterogeneous infrastructure. In addition, 91
percent of survey respondents noted concern about the inherent security
risks public clouds present.
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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