Software Appliances and Cloud Computing
Del.icio.usThird in a series about Novell’s comprehensive approach to cloud computing.
Reprise
In the June 15th posting, “The Cloud“, we identified five cloud infrastructure priorities:
- Connect
- Secure
- Manage
- Develop
- Collaborate
Developing for the Cloud
There will be many cloud platform interfaces that developers will choose from. Some providers will provide unique interfaces to allow developers to optimize for their platform. Others will take a standard approach. Some providers will focus on proprietary interfaces. Others will be open. Taken together, this new model—cloud computing—creates a new playing field and stimulates innovators to explore different ideas to exploit the opportunity.
This expansion of possibilities also creates an expansion of confusion for the developer. Which cloud am I optimizing for? Am I focused on clouds, physical devices, or virtual devices? Which hypervisor? Which management interfaces?
I would prefer if this were not a concern for the developer. What if there were a toolset which made it possible for the developer to develop once and run everywhere?
Novell and Appliances
Fifteen months ago Novell announced its appliance program. We stated a simple purpose—simplify application development for ISVs by allowing them to create software or virtual appliances using our toolset. A key approach is to allow ISVs to use less than the full operating system—such as our JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) and still carry certification.
Also important to developers is the ability to create appliances that can run as images for a variety of hypervisors. In our April 2008 announcement, we did just that. This was a Novell announcement —but we are more effective when we work with key infrastructure partners. So, we announced in February of this year that we are working closely with VMWare to ensure that the virtual appliances that customers build with SLES are VMWare Ready. This reflects the partnership approach we’ve talked about consistently for virtualization.
The Cloud
As mentioned above, ISVs and developers would like their code to run everywhere. How can they achieve this? Simple. Build an appliance on an appliance building platform that allows them to deploy anywhere.
With our existing approach to create software appliances and virtual appliances it is not a big leap for us to focus our toolset to allow developers to target applications for a variety of clouds. So our appliance program is precisely the right basis for Novell to be the company that enables “develop for the cloud”.
July 13th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Novell has tried to develop management tools that are agnostic, manage Linux, UNIX, and Windows physical servers; manage Hyper-V, ESX, and Xen virtual servers. A good idea on paper — McNamara had the same idea with the F-111 airplane in the 1960s, and it failed miserably — too complicated, general capability, but it did nothing useful well. It seems that the SWA tool set is taking a similar approach — Novell can build an appliance image for any hypervisor. Novell has had very limited success (Orchestrator/Orchestrate is a good example) with its agnostic management tools, partly because Novell is not viewed as a data center vendor and partly because they were overkill for what users wanted. Why do you think that this will be different for the SWA tools set?
July 15th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Novell has outstanding management tools that are agnostic that will have greater relevance as we move to a very open and heterogeneous cloud environment.
July 28th, 2009 at 7:29 am
[...] CTO Blog [...]
August 2nd, 2009 at 11:39 am
My comment is not specifically about “Soft Appliances and Cloud Computing” and more about Novell’s lack of visibility in the cloud computing marketplace.
Here is one glaring example of Novell’s inability to capture any “mind share” with regard to its cloud computing efforts that I recently experienced.
CloudCamp Boston was hosted last week at Microsoft’s New England R&D Center in Cambridge, MA. On July 29th CloubCamp Boston kicked-off with the participation of over 300 CloudCampers who were there because of their interest in cloud computing. The event lasted six hours and by all accounts it was a huge success.
Was Novell a sponsor? No. Was Microsoft a sponsor? Yes. I did find one Novell employee, Andrew Black, on the list of CloudCampers but Novell was a no-show. Even Unisys found some reason to sponsor the event! CloudCamp Boston was right in Novell’s corporate headquarters backyard in the same building where their Microsoft-Novell Interoprability Lab is located, yet they could not manage to sponsor the event.
Dr. Jaffe, what is wrong here? Why does Novell not pay attention to doing some of the simplest things like sponsoring CloudCamp and telling CloudCampers what Novell is doing in the cloud? Are we back to the bad old days when Novell didn’t know how to market itself?
August 3rd, 2009 at 2:42 pm
[...] week was especially exciting. As foreshadowed in Software Appliances and Cloud Computing we launched SUSE Studio a key tool in our overall appliance program and in developing for the [...]