Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

For some time we have discussed how technology can help companies enhance their tracking of events and as a result address compliance. It was almost three years ago that I first identified corporate governance as a key trend; and the opportunity to address it with identity management and security event management. Over the past several months we have intensified this effort.

A Three Step Strategy

Our three step strategy to address this imperative is:

• Integrate core assets to create a Compliance Management Platform.
• Acquire additional complementary assets that enhance compliance. Most notable was Privileged User Management to help secure Linux and UNIX systems.
• Work with key partners to bring them into our compliance framework.

The reason for this sequence is clear. We start with the basics, using the vast assets that we have in Identity Management and Security and Information Event Management. By adding complementary assets we further strengthen the solution. With this comprehensive technical approach, it is now time to bring an ecosystem of partners under our umbrella.

RSA Conference

It was gratifying to make progress on the last of these steps during last week’s RSA Conference.

Last Monday we announced certification of our Sentinel product with SAP’s NetWeaver technology platform. I have frequently pointed to our close partnership with SAP related to Linux. With this new announcement Novell technology further services SAP customers with enhanced functionality. Now alerts that come through SAP’s BC-XAL interface are brought into our comprehensive analysis of security related events.

We pride ourselves on the scalability of Sentinel to very large workloads. SAP environments are very demanding, so customers have a solution that scales with SAP.

Last Tuesday we announced together with McAfee that their ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) platform will be able to provide events to Sentinel as well. Two complementary security vendors work in an interoperable fashion to bring the best capabilities to our common customers.

Call for More Partners

Our Compliance platform is getting traction in the industry. Our next goal is to continue to intensify our integration with key partners. If you need compliance for your solution—please let us know!

For several years Novell has been building a vision of the next generation data center that addresses new customer needs. These needs are to leverage new technologies that reduce cost and complexity, but manage the risk of introducing them. Our Service Driven Data Center (SDDC) provides the cost reduction in a well managed fashion.

Cost Reduction Technologies

Key technologies that reduce the cost of a data center are:

• Open source in general and the Linux operating system in particular have a lower price tag. They also reduce cost by allowing faster exploitation of hardware technologies that further reduce cost, such as low-power and virtualization assists.
• Virtualization reduces cost by allowing physical processors to consolidate workloads.
• Cloud computing provides a means for a user to grab capacity without a lengthy approval process. Moreover, capacity can be ordered as needed. There is no danger of acquiring over-capacity that won’t be needed in the end.

These three technologies result in a low-cost data center. However, if they are left unmanaged, they can do more harm than good. Without a management framework, an enterprise can create stovepipes that optimize in the short-term, but are costly over time. Without knowing where workloads are being deployed, the CIO is left with complexity and risk.

Enter the “Service-Driven Data Center”

Last week, Novell unveiled our vision and offerings that manage workloads in a way that reduces cost and complexity but avoids the risk. We coined this the Service Driven Data Center (SDDC) to emphasize that a CIO’s focus is on the service they provide. We also explained how this is is done. The enterprise Builds the data center, at that point it can be Managed, and then continuous improvement arises when the enterprise Measures its data center. Let’s now take it one level deeper by elaborating on our unique offers.

• Build. The build offer proposes that the next generation data center be built on a platform that provides the low cost of computing offered by Linux, and leverages that platform for virtualization and cloud computing. With our recent SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 11 announcement, we have provided a platform that is ready for physical, virtual, cloud, and appliance deployments. While our management solutions work well irrespective of the platform choice used by a customer for build, we also believe that SLE is the best platform for many workloads.
• Manage. The manage offer emphasizes that optimization arises with tools that assess the best place to deploy workloads. Don’t trust tools that come from vendors that only want deployment on their own platforms. Since we acquired PlateSpin we insisted that our management technologies are agnostic of any particular platform—including our own! This was emphasized in last fall’s workload announcement—managing the data center requires agility to move workloads to the right place—on a physical server, a virtual server, or in the cloud.
• Measure. In addition to building and managing the data center, the CIO needs to continuously monitor, optimize, and inspect a dashboard, to be certain that (s)he has met end user needs. Agile tools that move workloads to different servers and into clouds introduce risk. Risk management balances the agility that comes with workload flexibility. So our measure offer applies the principles of Business Services Management to assure that the enterprise can manage, optimize, and inspect to a set of Service Level Agreements with the rest of the firm.

A Deliberate Strategy to Amass this Solution

Novell has been creating assets and acquiring companies to build out this vision and offers. We can now assemble the pieces into a single compelling package.

• The build piece began with the acquisition of SUSE Linux many years ago. There has been continued Novell investment and partnership with the open source community to make SLE 11 the desired platform to build the SDDC.
• The centerpiece of the SDDC is the ability to manage and optimize in an interoperable fashion. The ZENworks family of management products are now enhanced with the virtualization products from PlateSpin.
• The final acquisition was to add the Business Systems Management framework from Managed Objects.
• The technical vision, roadmap, and architecture which describes how to evolve these technologies to provide agility, is our Fossa architecture.

Last week, Novell unleashed SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 11 at the Open Source Business Conference. The major focus of the announcement was the business value provided by the latest and greatest Linux operating system. With SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Novell is providing value in several key areas:

• Ubiquity—the range of platforms; servers, clouds, appliances, and desktops where SLE is deployed.
• Interoperability—with other systems, protocols, and management infrastructures.
• Mission critical—high availability, clustering, reliability, and support.

These are the best indicators of the business value of SLE 11. But SLE 11 also represents the power of the open source community to innovate. Let’s look at some of the examples.

Communities: Linux, openSUSE, Mono

The open source development methodology amplifies Novell’s efforts in building SUSE Linux Enterprise. SLE is not a product built exclusively by Novell. It is built by packaging hundreds of projects that are created by upstream communities that make their work available to the world under free and open source licenses. It all starts with the Linux kernel, GNU utilities and tools, Apache, X.org, and hundreds of other projects that make up a Linux distribution.

Beyond that, the openSUSE Project creates the openSUSE distribution. Novell relies on the work of countless colleagues who work on openSUSE—which is a solid foundation we then build on to create SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Many other communities have work that flows into SLE. A prime example is the Mono community—whose work appears in our SLE Mono Extension. With SLE 11, Novell provides commercial support for Mono, making it suitable for mission critical deployments of .Net applications on Linux.

Optimization

Outstanding performance in virtual environments is critical. We develop deep understanding of core processing within an operating systems; how virtual machines compete for resources; and how hypervisors allocate resources to get performance. Our close partnerships with hypervisor vendors (including ourselves!) assures the depth. On the hypervisor side, our participation in the open source XEN community makes sure that we tune and optimize the performance of the XEN hypervisor based on this understanding.

And, to be sure, there is considerable work in working with the community to optimize for a physical desktop or server as well.

Appliances

Full enterprise operating systems are too feature-rich for certain deployments. We need a single Linux distribution which provides the richness when needed—and slims down when all customers need is Just Enough Operating System (JeOS) to run an application. That involves a careful analysis of each function and retaining only the core features that are needed. This innovative approach has led us to provide a variation—SUSE Linux Enterprise JeOS which removes unnecessary functions for appliances. Plus, we have an associated toolkit that allows customers to leverage the scale from turnkey to feature-rich.

Hardware Exploitation

The open source community works together to exploit new hardware features. This is a superior approach to conventional proprietary operating systems. With proprietary operating systems, a hardware vendor (for processors, storage, networks, etc.) might create an innovative new feature to address some current problem. But then it takes a long time until this is surfaced through the operating system. With the Linux kernel’s rapid development cycle, hardware vendors can see to it that the advanced hardware features are supported and exploited faster, and make their new features available to customers more quickly. SLE 11 features enhancements in virtualization and power management as two key examples of this. The “green” or power management innovations include having granular power profiles and tickless idle.

Mono

In the UNIX/Linux world, applications focus on the Java stack. However, the .Net stack is popular in Microsoft environments, and we have always believed that .Net developers will find more value in being able to run their applications on Linux. Mono allows companies to retain their investment in .Net applications by deploying them on Linux with minimal changes.

We’re continually impressed by Miguel de Icaza and the entire Mono community—to see how quickly they add Mono features. It has reached the level of maturity that we are supporting SLE Mono Extension as an innovative, supported version of Mono.

Summary

SLE 11 sets a new standard in business value for Linux. Numerous other initiatives within Novell, such as our ISV initiative are examples of how we add business value. But it is important to also acknowledge the open source innovation that goes into SLE.

Whether we view this from the breadth of “the power of the community”, or we look at specific innovations such as optimization, appliances, hardware support, and Mono—we have clear re-affirmation of the value of community developed software.