Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.
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.
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