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We are pleased to announce the release of Novell Operations Center 5.0. Many customer enhancements have been addressed and this is the highest quality release to date and the team is very excited about the crisp new look and feel to the solution.

The two items we are highlighting with the release are the configuration management system (CMS) and integration to Amazon EC2 and Novell Cloud Manager. Today’s environments are growing in complexity as dynamic infrastructures are evaluated and deployed requiring more than a CMDB, but a CMS to insure accuracy as well as a service level monitoring regardless of deployment option.

Social CMS

I’ve been speaking with the press this week and the common question is what is different here? The answer is two things, the interface and the automation.

Interface: The interface mimics many social media interfaces with communities to subscribe to whether they be technology or services based upon your role and interests, Google like searching and Del.icio.us like bookmarking on the pinboard. The concept is simple, make it Wikipedia like where the users by role contribute to the depth and accuracy of the attributes.

Automation: The power of the CMS is the automation to insure accuracy to standards and process compliance. Jobs can be set up to flag configuration items (CIs) that are out of compliance with a standard configuration as can service models be flagged when what is currently operating is out of synch with the last approved service configuration. Flags are used so that CIs and models can be reviewed for approved or unapproved change.

Monitoring Service Levels with the Cloud
Novell Operations Center 5.0 brings integration to collect Amazon EC2 monitoring and integration to Novell Cloud Manager to manage business service levels for private clouds. Cloud computing brings a new paradigm, however for those of us in data center management, what’s old is new again. Moving forward it will be incumbent upon IT to build in proper monitoring metrics and feed those key indicators back to systems management and monitoring of your business services whether they are private or public clouds.

Cloud computing is a deployment option providing flexibility to the organization and also brings with it complexity at the same time. In this mix of new deployment options, the business is also expecting transparency into service performance. End-to-End service performance managed to business objectives is an imperative requiring automation to enable growing the business rather than focusing on just keeping the lights on. This has been the core value of Novell Operations Center for more than a dozen years regardless of technology.

The Novell Operations Center team is happy to bring this release to the market and are very excited to assist customers realize true end-to-end service performance communication regardless of computing environment and the more complex, the more we say bring it on as this is where Novell Operations Center shines!

Check out this chalk talk and videos on What is BSM Really, Service Monitoring and Service Measuring with Novell Operations Center.

Michele

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Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.