On-Demand Workload Provisioning With Cloud Manager

Computer management services specialist Novell announced the availability of Cloud Manager, a product designed to enable customers to create and securely manage a cloud computing environment as an extension of existing data centre resources.

Cloud Manager is designed for heterogeneous IT environments which, the company said, gives customers the flexibility to create and manage private clouds regardless of the mix of hypervisors, operating systems and hardware platforms.

A Single Control Interface

Built from the ground up as a cloud-computing management platform, Cloud Manager offers a single console. This means that all business unit leaders, application teams and IT management can use the same console to request, approve, manage and report on IT services across their infrastructure.

Pernod Ricard’s chief information officer of premium wine brands is Ryan Klose who was an early adopter of Cloud Manager.

“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,” he said. “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.”

The management console allows the automatic creation and deployment of workloads into the virtual environment. The workload definitions are based on a service catalogue of templates.

Security profiles can also be configured at the user, group, workload and business service levels. A built-in connector to Novell Sentinel allows security managers to correlate events from Cloud Manager with other events detected in the cloud, or any other Sentinel-aware location. Support is provided for a range of industry hypervisors and operating systems, such as VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and open source Xen.

The system supports a range of operating systems, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“We’ve optimised Cloud Manager for the heterogeneous reality of most IT environments,” said Jim Ebzery, senior vice president and general manager of security, management and operating platforms at Novell. 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, 89 percent of them said they saw private clouds as the next logical step for organisations already using virtualisation. 93 percent felt that private cloud platforms should offer a management framework that can span a heterogeneous infrastructure.

The poll, conducted by Harris Interactive and sponsored by Novell, found that 91 percent of respondents noted concern about the inherent security risks public clouds present.