Novell Releases Cloud Manager

Novell is introducing Novell Cloud Manager, a workload management solution it says enables customers to create and securely manage a cloud computing environment as a seamless extension of existing data center resources.

One aspect of Cloud Manager that should ease the process of seamless data center extension is its availability as an on-demand device through a customizable interface. This enables developers to create private clouds that support a wide variety of hypervisors, operating systems and hardware platforms. In particular, Novell is promoting the solution as hypervisor-agnostic.

Beyond extensibility and flexibility, Novell is also trumpeting several other benefits it says Cloud Manager offers. Among them is automatic creation and deployment of workloads into the virtual environment based on a service catalog of predefined workload templates, which Novell says shortens workload provisioning times. In addition, Novell says the solution allows users to have costs linked to nearly all items relevant to a business service, enabling infrastructure managers to maintain pricing options for different user groups.

Security profiles can be configured at the user, group, workload and business service levels, and a built-in connector to the Novell Sentinel security/information management platform allows security managers to correlate events from Novell Cloud Manager with other events detected in the cloud or any other Sentinel-aware location, providing visibility into who has done what in the cloud. Novell Cloud Manager also integrates with the Novell Operations Center business management platform.

In recent weeks, a raft of vendors have released solutions designed to make cloud computing more accessible, interoperable with existing architectures, and secure. There seems to be a general IT industry sense that enterprise users are looking to place much larger stores of data and software onto secure private clouds that can be seamlessly managed.

Novell Cloud Manager is available now.