Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

In my last two postings, I introduced Novell’s future vision for an agile infrastructure to support computing and collaboration. I described the CIO motivation, eight use cases which make agility compelling, technology megatrends which make this possible, and the seven key technology areas which will allow the realization of this vision. These seven areas are: policy, identity, virtualization, Linux, orchestration, compliance and collaboration. In this posting, I will describe our roadmap for these seven areas.

Roadmap

Our roadmap is divided into three parts: what we’ve already done in the past, what we have done in the last month or two, and our 2012 targets.

Virtualization

• In 2006, Novell shipped Xen as an integrated part of our SUSE Linux Enterprise platform. In 2007, we collaborated with Microsoft to deliver the first cross-platform solution for running Windows on Linux.
• At BrainShare, for the first time anywhere in the world, we demonstrated live migration of Windows Server 2008. We had it running as a Xen virtual machine on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
• Our vision for virtualization is that the p-Distro becomes the core operating system for the physical machine and hosts the v-Distros. To get here, we have work to do: performance tuning, ISV certification, systems management, security improvements and device drivers.

Linux

• In 2006, Novell shipped the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform, the best-engineered platform for mission-critical computing from the desktop to the data center. Since then, we’ve become key for Microsoft, SAP, Capgemini and thousands of customers like Wal-Mart, HSBC and Casio. And we’ve shipped desktop Linux pre-loads with both Lenovo and Dell.
• At BrainShare we announced an expansion of our partnership with SAP to deliver optimized versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP, and also to bundle SUSE Linux Enterprise in SAP’s All-in-One bundles targeted at the small and medium-size business market.
• The Linux revolution will have even more traction by 2012. Linux will be everywhere. It will be on handhelds and more prevalent for mission-critical computing. Key investments for Linux are: Green IT, UNIX migration, interoperability, data center readiness, virtualization and desktop integration.

Orchestration

• In 2007, Novell introduced ZENworks Orchestrator, a solution to manage the workloads on physical and virtual machines in a dynamic way according to business policies.
• Last month we announced the acquisition of PlateSpin, whose products make it easy to cross physical and virtual boundaries and provide the agility you need in the data center, for tasks such as server consolidation, workload portability and disaster recovery. At BrainShare we demonstrated joint PlateSpin-Orchestrator solutions.
• In the Fossa vision, PlateSpin and ZENworks Orchestrator manage workloads comprehensively across physical and virtual boundaries. Identifying workloads and combining them into business-critical services is the future of management and the heart of the agile enterprise. Fossa ensures that services can run on physical or virtual machines; they are discovered, created, analyzed, instantiated, provisioned, de-provisioned and optimized automatically using policy and identity.

Policy

• Policy has been key to both Novell’s identity management and systems management product suites. Today, within the enterprise, there are many levels of policy dealing with different areas.
• At BrainShare we took another step forward. We unveiled our Integrated Identity Platform that provides the automation and validation of business processes that ensure good corporate governance and adherence to corporate compliance standards.
• Our vision is that the Fossa Project will provide uniform management of policies across services, applications and platforms. Policies will expand to include Service Level Agreements – even at the level of real-time performance. Policies will have more flexibility and automation.

Identity

• Digital User Identity has been the foundation of authentication and authorization.
• With our Integrated Identity Platform we provide an agile infrastructure that governs the lifecycle of users and their changing access needs. By combining our Integrated Identity Platform with ZENworks Orchestrator, we are extending identity lifecycle management to all elements of the data center including storage, virtual machines and workloads.
• Our Fossa vision provides a rich language to characterize identity attributes of devices. Resources will be routinely distributed across different systems, even between different administrative domains. The development of Identity Services will expand the ability for applications to leverage identity infrastructures.

Compliance

• There are multiple regulatory forces in the most basic business processes: government regulations, best-practice certifications, contract restrictions, laws and internal codes of conduct.
• Last month, Novell took a huge step forward in automating how companies address this by demonstrating how Sentinel addresses both monitoring and enforcing-for-compliance to the PCI – or Payment Card Industry – standard. In addition, the Identity Platform we are demonstrating this week includes provable compliance.
• Our Fossa vision will provide standard taxonomies for events, compliance data, policies and roles. This completes the journey from manual reporting to automated remediation to inherent compliance.

Collaboration

• With OES 2 and GroupWise, Novell has a strong record in secure collaboration. Last year, Novell launched Teaming + Conferencing to enable enterprise social networking. We did this through a partnership with SiteScape.
• Two months ago, we purchased SiteScape! Why? Our customers told us how much they liked Teaming + Conferencing so it just made sense! SiteScape is the founder of the ICEcore open source project, and Novell has pledged additional resources to foster a vibrant community. To make your business agile, your users must be agile – which means they need easy-to-use, secure collaboration tools that provide enterprise social networking.
• By 2012, we will offer the most productive user experience of a flexible unified communications infrastructure and a software collaboration suite built by the community, on open standards, and that spans enterprise boundaries. Policy and identity will keep the collaboration techniques safe to use.

Novell and the open source community

Quite a roadmap. For Novell to complete this roadmap requires the full participation and involvement of the open source community. Parts of the open source community are quite cohesive, the Linux kernel being a great example of that. We are making further strides to improve the cohesiveness of Linux. The Linux Foundation through its LSB project has increased investment to create a standard Linux.

Other domains need better coordination. As I look at the areas of opportunity for Fossa, I see four generic areas: core or operating systems, systems management, identity management and collaboration. Each area already has substantial open source investment and various projects. Part of Fossa’s focus will be for Novell to more actively engage in these areas, prevent fragmentation and describe a roadmap.

Continuation of our existing strategy

While Fossa moves the ball forward, it is also consistent with the strategy that the company has around Enterprise Linux and I/T Management software that I described.

How do they fit together? The Fossa Project is the next-generation infrastructure that will manage I/T with agility and help people and technology work as one. Where does one manage resources? Well, resources in a single system are managed by the operating system. That’s the Enterprise Linux piece. Resources across systems are managed by the I/T Management software. That’s the I/T Management piece. The Fossa Project is aligned with Novell’s corporate strategy. An agile infrastructure requires both types of resource management – the operating system and the management system. Novell is the only company in the world that single-mindedly focuses on resource management of all shapes and sizes, from the operating system to the hardware. We are exactly in the right place for this mission.

In my last posting, I introduced Novell’s future vision for an agile infrastructure to support computing and collaboration. I described the CIO motivation, technology megatrends which make this possible, and the seven key technology areas which will allow the realization of this vision. These seven areas are: policy, identity, virtualization, Linux, orchestration, compliance and collaboration.

Before describing our roadmap for these areas, I wanted to provide some further motivation by describing a bit more how we arrived at agility as the central need.

We started by looking at customer needs. We looked at some of the difficult problems customers are addressing today: virtual teams, the flat enterprise, M&A, extranets, resource optimization. We then wrote out eight scenarios in prose. What do customers want to achieve in each of these problem areas? What is possible today? What is lacking?

Sitting around the table – it hit us! Much of what customers want to do can be done today. As long as they go through arcane complex processes, handle much of the work manually, and have plenty of time to plan the transitions. Function was there! Agility was lacking. Hence the focus of the project.

I am reproducing capsules of three of these scenarios here, but a more complete description of all eight can be found here (see Presentations).

Scenarios or use cases

1. Pursuing New Business Opportunities. Every business experiences variable demands on its digital infrastructure. The traditional approach to this fluid demand has been to purchase resources to meet the peak requirements and then watch these resources lie dormant during those times when the demand is modest – an expensive waste of resource.

Fossa erases separate hardware silos for various services, so each service is able to receive ample resources and those resources are reused for other applications throughout the day. This leverages our work in virtualization, orchestration and automation. Through new system reporting software, companies view the usage rates for resources and the improved productivity of the hardware. Senior management gets a better idea of where the company spends its time and IT budget.

2. The Life and Times of the New Virtual Team. Companies are dynamic. Projects come and go quickly. The economic landscape changes, core competencies shift, and employees find themselves learning new skills, working with different groups, and creating different products. The once stable “work group” has now become a virtual work group. Members come from many departments, and the work relationships may be quick or long lasting. Information needs to be created, exchanged and subjected to team edits. Access to digital resources needs to be granted and withdrawn. Layers of company confidentiality must be maintained.

In the Fossa Project architecture, virtual teams are defined by the teams themselves without IT involvement. Access to data, collaboration tools and other team members is initiated by the team leader without any additional assistance or guidance. These collaboration tools are full of capability – new techniques to collaborate with. Virtualized teams spread across corporate boundaries through advances such as SAML and tokenized identity. Where possible, software is presented as a Web service to foster participation and preserve access to legacy applications. A full audit record ensures there was accountability for the privilege and compliance to the policies.

3. Merger, Acquisition and Reorganization. Companies are born, merge with other companies, acquire other companies, and constantly reorganize to reflect the changing economic and business landscape. The agile company is able to continually reorganize its digital resources to reflect this dynamic environment. Differences from company to company do not slow down a merger from being incorporated into a highly interoperable environment with productivity.

The Fossa Project brings together identity, security and policy to facilitate sharing of information within compliance requirements both inside and beyond your enterprise. It enhances the ability of the business to engage in mergers and acquisitions or outsource activities and more quickly complete the separation or integration activities. Perhaps most important, the Fossa Project provides interoperability between architectures to ensure that any device at any location can access system resources.

More to come

Again, I really want to get to the roadmap, but this is getting long for a blog. Stay posted for next time.