Novell Delivers First Solution for Comprehensive Cloud Management

Novell today announced the availability of Novell® Cloud Manager, a new solution that enables customers to create and securely manage a cloud computing environment as a seamless extension of existing data center resources. Unlike competitive solutions that lock customers into proprietary technology stacks, Novell Cloud Manager is designed for the heterogeneous reality of most IT environments, giving users the freedom and flexibility to create and manage private clouds which support all leading hypervisors, operating systems and hardware platforms. Only Novell Cloud Manager lets IT administrators package, price and present IT services on-demand through a customizable interface. Customers can leverage the flexibility and cost savings of cloud computing, without the security and compliance risks inherent in public clouds.

In a recent survey of more than 200 IT professionals at large enterprises, 89 percent of respondents see 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 note concern about the inherent security risks public clouds present. The survey was conducted by Harris Interactive and sponsored by Novell.

"Novell 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 Novell Cloud Manager, our BIS Infrastructure team can be more responsive to changing business priorities. Novell 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."

Built from the ground up as a cloud computing management platform, Novell Cloud Manager is one of the few cloud management products to offer a single, comprehensive console that all stakeholders - business unit leaders, application teams and IT management - can use to request, approve, manage and report on IT services across their entire infrastructure. It is hypervisor-agnostic, which is becoming more important as today's enterprises increasingly deploy a mix of hypervisors in their data centers.

"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 Novell 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."

The latest product to be released from Novell's WorkloadIQ™ roadmap, Novell Cloud Manager is a major milestone in Novell's delivery of products to meet the growing demand for intelligent workload management solutions. Intelligent workload management helps companies leverage their existing IT assets to realize the significant cost benefits offered by new models like virtualization and cloud computing, and provides them with the necessary tools to securely manage their IT services across organizational and geographical boundaries, and across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

"The phenomenal adoption of virtualization technologies within the data center has solved many IT problems, but has also made it easy for rapid proliferation of individual virtual machines that consume the finite available physical resources at a very rapid pace," said Fred Broussard, research director, PC, Device and IT Service Management Software at IDC. "What today's changing IT environments demand is a practical solution that will help deliver on the promise of utility computing and attain the ROI benefits of virtualization - products that create and manage cloud environments by provisioning whole IT services, comprised of one or more workloads, in a controlled, secure and compliant way."

Novell Cloud Manager Benefits
Some of the key benefits of Novell Cloud Manager include:

• Supports the industry's leading hypervisors and operating systems - enables customers to leverage their existing IT resources. Novell Cloud Manager currently supports multiple hypervisors including VMware* vSphere, Microsoft* Hyper-V*, and open source Xen*; operating systems including SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server, Microsoft Windows* Server and Red Hat* Enterprise Linux.
• Delivers IT services faster with automated, on-demand workload provisioning -- beyond simply managing the request and approval workflow, Novell Cloud Manager automatically creates and deploys workloads into the virtual environment based on a service catalog of predefined workload templates. Workload provisioning times are dramatically shortened, making the entire process of deploying new business services both faster and more efficient.
• Controls virtual sprawl with cost visibility -- exposes the real costs of workloads, resources and service levels, allowing business service owners to select only what they really need. Costs can be linked to nearly all items relevant to a business service: workloads, associated resources (virtual CPUs, memory, virtual network cards and disk space) and service levels. Infrastructure managers have the flexibility to maintain pricing options for different user groups.
• Creates a secure and compliant environment -- enforces an organization's internal approval process, as well as best practices like ITIL. Security profiles can be configured at the user, group, workload and business service levels, ensuring consistent application of security policies and rights management.
• Integrates with best-in-class security and business service management products -- A built-in connector to Novell Sentinel™ allows security managers to correlate events from Novell Cloud Manager with other events detected in the cloud or any other Sentinel-aware location providing visibility into who has done what in the cloud. Novell Cloud Manager also integrates with Novell Operations Center, the next generation of business service management, to deliver unmatched visibility into business efficiency.

Availability
Novell Cloud Manager is available now. For more information, visit www.novell.com/cloudmanager.