March 2008
Features
- Tech Talk 01 Get ready for a new release of GroupWise. Wanna busy search a client's calendar? Go for it. Want more panels on your home view? Track a couple of Web sites in your home view too. Take your pick of these and many more new features in the next release of GroupWise.
- Tech Talk 02 Upgrading from NetWare to the next generation of technology doesn't have to be painful—or costly. Take advantage of all the benefits Open Enterprise Server 2 offers for less and without the pain of retraining your staff. See how this migration path stacks up against moving to the big unknown—Windows Server 2008.
- Tech Talk 03 Try it just once and it'll be the last time you'll want to call support. It's faster, cheaper and unlimited. See how this new support option is going to change the way you want support from Novell.
- Tech Talk 04 Does your enterprise have legacy systems that won't talk to other computers? The hotel industry had that problem-until Novell stepped in. Now, using code that Novell open sourced, the hotel industry can use identity management solutions-on their legacy systems! See how you can teach your old systems to talk.
- Tech Talk 05 The word spin can have a negative connotation—unless it's PlateSpin. Read how Novell's acquisition of Toronto-based PlateSpin is going to give your data center several positive benefits. If you want your data center tasks to manage themselves, welcome to the new Novell technology from PlateSpin.
- Tech Talk 06 For beginners, databases can be frightening. But with a little help in building effective forms, you'll be on your way to populating a database that can almost take care of itself. See how here in our OpenOffice.org series cover the database application included in the free office suite.
- Tech Talk 07 If you're like most companies, your end users' teams are comprised of people across the globe. Yet they want to feel like their teammates are just down the hall. Enter Sitescape. It's now a part of Novell and provides the engine to the new Novell Teaming + Conferencing products. Find out how this recent acquisition benefits you.
Connection Magazine March full .pdf
Departments
- Proof Point Toll Brothers, the leading builder of luxury homes in the U.S., had issues. One was managing desktops across 300 locations, including construction site trailers across 22 states. Keeping them in standard, working order was quite a problem. See how Novell automated that, increased the security of sensitive financial data, and much more.
- Trend Talk Are you up on your backups? Are you a synthetic backer upper? What about your recovery objectives? How will you recover after the crisis strikes? Learn what types of backup and recovery procedures are available, so when the crisis strikes, you'll be up on your backups and know just how to recover.
- Laura Chappell Analysis Session: TCP Connection Loss
The
Right Spin
Managing your data center
just got a whole lot easier
Tech Talk 5 By John Stetic
Business moves faster every day. To keep up, organizations need an agile IT infrastructure that immediately responds to changing business conditions. IT needs to be a strategic productivity center rather than a rigid cost center. However, new levels of infrastructure complexity and heterogeneity make it more difficult for IT to respond to its business users' requests.
Historically, every time the business user needed a new service, the solution was to provision a new physical server with a single application or purpose. This practice is an inherently expensive, rigid and inefficient approach. Virtualization has emerged to offer new efficiencies and represents another powerful tool in the CIO’s arsenal; however it is not, in and of itself, the silver bullet.
Virtual infrastructures must coexist with new and legacy physical infrastructures, creating a new set of management challenges, including cross infrastructure management, security, provisioning and IT chargeback. To solve these emerging challenges, you need to answer several key questions:
- How do I find existing physical workloads that would be better served running in a virtualized environment?
- How do I find virtualized workloads that are consuming a disproportionate amount of shared resources and should be moved to a physical server?
- How can I easily assemble and move workloads between physical and virtual infrastructures?
- How will I manage the entire lifecycle of workloads and ensure sufficient resource capacity to accommodate current and future business needs?
- How do I deliver the right business services and align IT to the business?
- How do I allocate IT costs in the shared resource environment that virtualization enables?
- How do I control and manage growth of the data center? Provisioning virtual machines eliminates the need to purchase new hardware; yet it often leads to virtual infrastructure sprawl and management headaches.
- How do I change process and policies founded on principles of the static, physical-only data center to accommodate the new flexibility of virtualization? How do I build a new data center that includes both a physical and a virtual infrastructure?
Data center agility requires more than holistic management of the data center. Greater agility in desktop and server provisioning, change control, and access management is also required to serve the needs of the business. Different solutions are needed to plan and execute change projects, whether for server consolidation and virtualization, hardware migration or entire data center relocation initiatives. Organizations embark on all of these initiatives with the goal of reducing costs and improving efficiencies.
Sadly, many suffer critical delays and unnecessary risks because of insufficient planning or the lack of solution-focused products to assist them.
The Ideal Solution Framework
By helping dissolve the bonds between software and hardware, virtualization encourages organizations to see the data center in a different way—not as a collection of static servers, but as a set of portable workload units. At the most basic level, a workload encapsulates the data, applications and operating systems that reside on a physical or virtual host.
A next-generation infrastructure management solution that meets the following criteria is needed.
- It's equally at home in both physical and virtual environments;
- It helps data center managers and architects choose the best environment, whether physical or virtual, without vendor lock in;
- It's a unified solution that can assess your workloads, tell you which environment is best, easily provision, relocate, protect and optimize that environment throughout its lifetime.
Announcing PlateSpin
With some 5,000 customers worldwide including nearly half of the Fortune 500, Toronto-based PlateSpin has focused on cross-platform functionality and interoperability throughout their product portfolio. Its solutions offer enterprises the ability to separate server workloads from underlying hardware. They make it possible to profile, deploy, move, copy, protect and replicate these workload units anywhere in the data center across physical and virtual boundaries. PlateSpin has successfully completed more than 700,000 server workload migrations—the most of any player in the virtualization market.
Figure 1
PlateSpin PowerRecon provides scenario modeling, forecasting and planning capabilities to take the guesswork out of server consolidation, disaster recovery, capacity planning and virtual infrastructure management.
Figure 2
With PlateSpin PowerConvert, enterprises can perform anywhere-to-anywhere server workload migrations across heterogeneous IT infrastructures spanning physical and virtual hosts.
Figure 3
The PlateSpin Forge recovery hardware appliance provides an ever-present Web-based dashboard that enables IT operations specialists to view the status of server workload protection at all times.
