Novell News

Today, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) released a white paper that is a must read for anyone interested in the next steps for cloud interoperability. The white paper, “Interoperable Clouds – A White Paper from the Open Cloud Standards Incubator,” outlines usage scenarios for cloud interoperability, the cloud service lifecycle and a cloud reference architecture.

Novell is a board member of the DMTF, an organization focused on bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on system management standards. As part of its work with DMTF, Novell participates on the DMTF Open Cloud Standards Incubator, and contributed to the development of the white paper.

This paper is timely because as cloud computing continues to evolve, standard interfaces will play a pivotal role in promoting interoperability between cloud service providers and cloud service consumers.

Novell is committed to delivering solutions to enable our customer to move their existing infrastructure to a shared cloud environment, and ensure their private and public cloud environments work well together. Our PlateSpin virtualization and workload management products help to identify and evaluate workloads and migrate them to the cloud. Our business service management products help to maximize service levels and optimize workload efficiency. Our Cloud Security Service serves as an entry point for cloud control, extending existing enterprise authentication credentials to the cloud and allowing workloads to be deployed to the cloud in a secure and auditable manner.

Yesterday VMware announced significant advancements to its vCloud Initiative, designed to help customers safely tap compute capacity for internal and external clouds. As a long time partner, Novell is supporting VMware’s vCloud Initiative with a new pricing model for OEMs.

Susan Heystee, vice president and general manager of Global Alliances at Novell, said, “Novell is excited to provide support for VMware’s vCloud Initiative and plans to make SUSE Linux Enterprise available to provide the flexibility VMware’s customers and cloud service providers are looking for. Cloud-centric pricing for SUSE Linux Enterprise coupled with a VMware vSphere-based cloud infrastructure will help service providers deliver the scalability and reliability needed to respond to customers’ changing business needs. With SUSE Studio, our appliance creation tool, we enable enterprises to build customized SUSE Linux Enterprise-based virtual appliances, which can easily be deployed to internal or external clouds.”

For more information on Novell’s vCloud pricing, contact Marcin Kurc, mkurc@novell.com.

Xen.org recently announced the Xen Cloud Platform initiative, a new community-led effort to build on the Xen hypervisor in today’s cloud, and deliver a secure and proven open source infrastructure platform for the federated cloud services of tomorrow. According to Xen.org, the Xen Cloud Platform will accelerate the use of cloud infrastructure for enterprise customers by providing open source virtual infrastructure technology that makes it easy for service providers to deliver secure, customizable, multi-tenant cloud services that work seamlessly with the virtualized application workloads customers are already running in their internal data centers and private clouds, without locking them into any particular vendor.

As a member of the Xen.org advisory board member, along with other technology vendors, such as Citrix, HP, Intel, and Oracle, Novell supports the Xen Cloud Platform initiative.

Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of business and product management for Open Platform Solutions at Novell, said, “As an active member of the Xen open source project, Novell is excited to participate in the Xen Cloud Platform initiative. Novell is committed to an open source model that thrives on the support and contributions of a strong community. Creating a stable, well-defined public API for Xen will help drive its rapid adoption inside the enterprise and in clouds.”