Novell Unveils Service-Driven Data Center Vision

Novell today announced an integrated vision for the future of the data center and a portfolio of integrated products designed to help customers increase agility while reducing cost, complexity and risk. The Service—Driven Data Center provides solutions to build, manage and measure the next generation data center so IT executives can deliver the business services that end users need through a flexible, automated and cost-effective infrastructure. Only Novell has the unique combination of technology-agnostic, interoperable and easy-to-use solutions that let customers maximize the utilization of their IT assets within a secure and compliant framework – whether customers are running a server farm, building an internal cloud, or using an external cloud.

"We've talked to hundreds of customers and partners, and the one thing we've heard from everyone is that IT exists to meet business needs, to deliver the services that business demands," said Jeff Jaffe, chief technology officer and executive vice president of business units at Novell. "The Service-Driven Data Center delivers an agile, cost-effective infrastructure through a combination of modular yet integrated solutions for enterprise Linux, virtualization and workload management, and business service management."

Driving the Evolution of the Data Center
The data center is in the midst of a significant evolution. Most data centers today are focused on increasing flexibility to realize maximum efficiency from their existing assets. These optimizations are often done from a purely IT perspective, without being informed by the way that IT infrastructure relates to business requirements. With the introduction of business service management, and the ability to drive business visibility down into the IT infrastructure, organizations now have the ability to transform their data center into something that is more service-driven and business-centric.

In the future, as the data center moves beyond the four walls of the enterprise and the lines blur between legacy capacity, the internal cloud, and the external cloud, organizations will need new tools to securely and efficiently manage the movement of heterogeneous workloads across that infrastructure while delivering consistent service to the line of business. The Service-Driven Data Center is the first step toward delivering on the vision of managing that heterogeneous, multi-sourced capacity in a secure and compliant manner.

"Data centers are complex, with virtually endless combinations of platforms, directories, systems and applications," said Peter O'Neill, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. "This environment is driving organizations to embrace technologies that help them to be more responsive to changing business requirements. As the need to control costs and service quality increases dramatically, IT management solutions have to evolve to meet these new requirements."

Components of the Service-Driven Data Center
Built on an ITIL blueprint, the Service-Driven Data Center removes execution risk and manages complexity by establishing a secure, controlled, repeatable and efficient data center service model that delivers measurable results. Designed to work in a heterogeneous environment, the Service-Driven Data Center leverages intelligent management and automation tools to measure performance of a complete IT service against business objectives. The Service-Driven Data Center is an integrated, yet modular vision that has three main components:

• Build: Enterprise Linux Servers: The operating system is the foundation of the IT infrastructure, so interoperability and flexibility are required. Launched on March 24, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 is designed for mission-critical computing across the enterprise, including physical, virtual, appliance and cloud deployments.
• Manage: Virtualization and Workload Management: Novell takes a holistic view of a workload, defined as a suite of operating system, middleware and applications working together to provide services to end users. With PlateSpin Workload Management solutions, enterprises can quickly respond to business demands by leveraging virtualization to optimize, balance and protect all servers in the heterogeneous data center.
• Measure: Business Service Management: To ensure the quality of service workloads, tools are required to measure service level agreement performance and link the underlying IT infrastructure with the business service it delivers. Novell Business Service Management solutions provide a complete view into the life cycle of a system, giving enterprises better visibility into where and how workloads are running in the data center.

Availability
All of the solutions in the Service-Driven Data Center are available today. For more information on Novell's service-driven data center solutions, visit www.novell.com/datacenter.