Novell News

Business going to the Cloud can be the Catalyst for IT to Measure and Communicate Value!

How many of us have heard what a road block IT is, how costly / what a mystery IT is and IT cannot communicate value to the business leaving frustration in the organization. It's sort of like the Mars and Venus thing and "if they only understood me better" debate. It's OK to laugh, we all suffer these discussions, I too am guilt – the makings of a good Dilbert cartoon no doubt ending with Catbert reigning down his wrath of mandates. However, with all sourcing decisions, it is about creating change in an environment where change is difficult and should be embraced. IT has the opportunity to do just that and be the hero in the end. This is a good sourcing option as it creates the change that will drive down costs that are difficult for in-house IT to drive.

Moving from technology silos to managing and communicating in terms of services is easier than one thinks. It does require different management approaches and technology, measuring in terms of service and yes, sometimes the right investment can save money in the end while creating value. A recent Network World Article (http://bit.ly/aTL0Gy) has a good quote from a good friend of mine and Forrester analyst, Glenn O'Donnell, "invest in analysis, not monitoring". The monitoring data is required, but means nothing when not related to other bits of techno data and turned into information by which to perform useful analysis about services and the value delivered to the business. This becomes ever more challenging when in a mixed environment, physical, virtual, cloud, and when many management tools exist as well.

CIO also published an article yesterday "Why IT Costs Must Come Out of the Black Box — Now" (http://bit.ly/b62xpA) describing similar requirements for service measuring and service transparency. The lack of transparency drives the business to seek alternatives where they contract for a service and know the cost. What is often left out is the definition of good service levels, which is a topic for a separate blog. The new service appears cheaper and why is that? Economies of scale is one piece, shared service, ……the second piece is they are very standard, non custom, no configuration, minimal choices, if any, services. Standardization that is difficult to impose from in-house without the cost transparency, service measurements and links to business priorities. This is not a fair apples to apples comparison of services, however, a standardization many IT organizations have difficulty implementing as an in-house provider without the measuring of services and transparency, but possible moving forward.

Instead of challenging the business in moving to a cloud provider, I suggest embracing it and offer that history will repeat itself with many of these start up providers bringing the service back in-house and providing the opportunity to be the hero, improve service quality, reduce costs and communicate value. Many will fail due to lack of good service level agreements, lack of the business asking for them and collapse or dissatisfaction of the business with a single costly service impacting event.

Embrace the opportunity to do a few things in the meantime:

1. Standardize, drive down costs for services and technologies that do not require customization
2. Measure the provider, start to deliver service levels and views of transparency of in and outsourced services
3. Develop and Implement the service view and transparency into the "black box" of IT
4. Invest in the analytic measuring and viewing technology, less on the commodity monitoring – explore open source

When Outsourcing Creates Good Change – Embrace the Cloud Providers – Consolidate Tools and Invest in becoming a Service Measuring Organization Communicating Value!

Check out Novell's unique approach with WorkloadIQ and Measuring! (http://bit.ly/bJ0bJh) and Novell Operations Center

Novell Announces WorkloadIQ (http://bit.ly/9O7KqK) – Measuring with Novell Operations Center

• Data Center

Novell Senior Vice President and Global Alliances General Manager Joe Wagner was interviewed during a session at VMworld today. Wagner responded to questions regarding Novell and VMware’s recent expansion of partnership and new agreement terms.

VMworld features various sessions during the week-long event, often holding presentations, panels, interviews and demonstrations. David Vallante, Co-Founder of The Wikibom Project, conducted the interview with Joe Wagner on Wednesday, Sept. 1, at 1:00 PM. Wagner answered questions such as:

- What news do you have to share from VMworld?
- Why did Novell and VMware make this agreement?
- What value will VMware customers get from this?
- How can one get more information about this new partnership offering?

Novell and VMware have a long-standing relationship in further developing infrastructure technology. Their recent agreement enables VMware to distribute and support the SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Under the agreement, VMware intends to standardize its virtual appliance-based product offerings on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. You may read the release here: http://www.novell.com/news/press/vmware-and-novell-deliver-suse-linux-enterprise-server-for-vmware

Joe Wagner serves as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Global Alliances at Novell. He is responsible for driving strategic objectives and establishing major partnership ecosystems on which to build market relevance and growth businesses at Novell. This encompasses building strategic global partnerships with leading technology companies including VMware.

Novell is an infrastructure software company that is leading the intelligent workload management market with its differentiated approach, WorkloadIQ. Novell helps organizations securely deliver and manage computing services across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments with its solutions for identity and security, systems management, collaboration and Linux based operating platforms.

Viewers may watch the interview and follow up on other VMworld events through VMware’s Social Media and Blogger Lounge, found at http://www.vmworld.com/blogs/vmworld/2010/08/28/social-media-blogger-lounge-with-live-video-coverage.

In the next installment of our Novell podcast series, Liz Padula, senior marketing manager at Novell, talks with Peter Bowen, architect for the SUSE Appliance Program, about Novell’s first annual “Disters” awards.

For those of you who don’t know Dister, he is the mascot for SUSE Studio, a free, web-based appliance building tool that is a key technology component of our SUSE Appliance Program. For appliances built in SUSE Studio and published in SUSE Gallery, we will be awarding $10,000 to the creators of the most inventive software appliances in two categories: “Community Use” and “Commercial Use”. Judges include Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, Markus Rex, senior vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions at Novell, and other industry influencers.

“It’s a great way to show off what you can do and win some money at the same time,” says Bowen.

Anyone using SUSE Studio today is eligible to win, so start building or vote for your favorite appliance today!

by Jay Roxe, Director, ISM Product Marketing

CA certainly has been on a buying spree recently to try to move itself into the Cloud space.  With the space predicted to grow at more than a 15% CAGR, it's little wonder as to why.  However, this recent acquisition smacks of putting a square peg in a round hole.

Arcot has a nice solution for strong authentication but as an authentication play, it's not that interesting.  It's about time that CA patched that hole in their SiteMinder portfolio.  Other providers (Novell included) offer token-less strong authentication.  I'm left scratching my head and wondering if this is truly a cloud security play or merely paying a lot for a technology labeled "cloud."

The second part of the Arcot acquisition is a solution for providing single-sign on for cloud applications.  I think it's missing in a couple of fundamental aspects:

• It's only hosted by Arcot.  Other state-of-the-art players, such as Novell and Ping Identity, are working with cloud providers to offer this to their existing customers instead of trying to build a new channel.  If you're an enterprise in the middle of the move to the cloud do you really want to have to deal with yet another vendor?
• It misses the fact that single-sign on in the cloud is about a lot more than just sign-on.  Providers need to provide auditing, logging, and the foundational technology needed to ensure compliance.

Identity and Security in the Cloud are on everybody's mind these days — particularly with the VMWare conference this week — but this was an big acquisition by CA that will require a lot of integration work and cause yet more churn.

When I say “curator”, what image comes to your mind?  If you envision a lady or gentleman of significant experience, perhaps clothed in the garb of academia, or a hip artist type, you aren’t alone.  Or wrong.  Mostly.

But, if you partake of social networking, go look in a mirror.  It’s okay, I’ll wait.  Do you remember the person you saw?  Good, because that person is also a curator.

One of the most powerful functions of any social media endeavor is curation.  The amount of information on the net is so enormous that without some kind of filtering we could never find what we need when we need it.  Thus, the leaders in social networking tools leverage the power of curation to filter content.  Unlike the classic picture of the museum curator who uses his or her expertise to filter the content you see, in the social world, you choose your own curators.

Let’s look at three examples of social curation, FaceBook, Twitter and Digg.

FaceBook has the perspective of seeing posts from your friends on your wall.  You choose your FaceBook “friends” based on criteria you self select.  So instead of seeing the enormous influx of FaceBook posts, you get a curated view.   With over 500,000 active members, each generating an average of 90 posts per month, there’s no way any person could deal with that influx.  So we select the friends we see and look at their posts because they may interest us, or have a high likelihood of creating interest.  FaceBook uses apps and targeted advertising through a highly curated model for content injection as well.

Twitter is curation by design.  This was a design precept of founder Jack Dorsey and is continued with great focus by Ev Williams and Biz Stone today.  The whole concept behind following someone is to create a filtered stream of content that may be of interest to you.  This makes handling the 105M users and 600M searches per day a more personal affair.

When Kevin Rose saw Digg’s numbers start to plummet, he looked closely at the data and discovered that users were finding Digg was becoming too much of a firehose on wide spray, instead of more focused content.  In an interview around the design precepts for Digg4, he shared that one of the key design elements in the revamp was to ensure that a Digg user’s first view was of Diggs from other Digg users that the viewer followed.  Initial reviews of the new design have been resoundingly positive and web hit data indicates a strong upturn in Digg resonance.

All this may be fascinating, but what’s the point?  The point is the coming release of Novell Pulse.

Pulse is the next generation of collaboration.  As you’ve seen from announcements, press coverage, videos and other media, Pulse is more than email, more than IM, more than chat, more than co-editing.  It is absolutely all those things, but I think there is a critical value proposition not yet clearly elocuted.

By bringing together different people, and different groups and by design providing incredibly agile “views” without some artificial constraint, Pulse provides the user the power to created curated streams without having to learn any code, convoluted filter statements or perform other computing gymnastics.  So while I see tons of content in my Pulse stream, if I want to see only what Ken Muir has posted, including stuff he posted months ago, I just click on Ken’s avatar.  I’ve performed curation without thinking about it.  When I want to find something that Andy Fox or Wendy Steinle has posted, it’s equally easy.  The same is true for groups.  Moreover, I don’t need to be online when the post is made because Pulse retains history with transparency.  I also don’t need to worry about downloading attachments to Pulse feeds for fear of not being able to find them later, because they will be where they were, and if needs be I can search for them.  Search is just another form of curation.

The challenge that we all will face is not that there isn’t content, it’s that there will be more content than we can reasonably deal with.  The other problem is one of authority.  How can we be sure that the content creator or commenter is who we think it is?  We’ve already seen the privacy and security concerns burst into flame around some of the open socials.  Pulse brings identity and security to the process, so not only can we control the inbound, we can also have confidence that the source stream originator is who we think it is.

Lot’s of people who didn’t get the difference wrote the Pulse = Wave equation.  They were and are wrong.  Similar in concept but different in execution.  As Mr. Parker once said “with great power comes great responsibility” and today only Pulse provides the 360 degree capability to exercise that power responsibly.

Until next time, peace.

Ross Chevalier

CTO, Novell Americas

by Gary Ardito, Senior Director of Service Provider Solutions

I recently had the opportunity to be a guest on cloudchasers on the role service providers are going to play in the evolving cloud computing market. It was a great opportunity to discuss the issues driving service providers in this market.

The markets for service providers are shifting. The increasing adoption of cloud computing is creating a level of market dynamics we have not seen in many years. These dynamics are forcing all service providers to question the services they offer their customers and how they will differentiate themselves in the future.

The first thing I notice when looking at this market is the wide spectrum of different service providers being impacted by this shifting market. We can look at the service providers across the following segments:

• Current cloud services providers (Amazon, Rackspace, Savvis)
• Current telcos (Verizon, AT&T)
• Content providers (Comcast, Time Warner Cable)
• Hosting/outsourcers (ACS, CSC, Dell/Perot)
• System integrators (Cap Gemini, Accenture, Deloitte and Touche)

It is important to note that for the purposes of this conversation we are talking about very large, Tier 1 service providers. There are thousands of smaller providers in the consulting and MSP markets that are equally impacted by the market conditions we are discussing.

The impact of the shift to cloud computing is being felt in each of these service provider segments.  We are in the midst of one of the rare tipping points where we will see a complete realignment of how and where customers will consume IT services. Those service providers that embrace this change and work hard to position themselves in the new markets will succeed. Those that do not will quickly lose relevancy with and the commitment of their customers.

These shifts are putting both financial and technical pressure on the service providers to not only define what services they will offer customers but also determine if they are capable of doing so at the new market driven price points.

Service providers are working out how they fit in this world but, right now, there are more questions than solid answers. These questions range from which type of services to offer all the way to how cost effectively they can deliver cloud services.

Some of the questions facing today’s service providers are:

1. What type of cloud (or cloud services) will the service provider focus on?  Public, private, hybrid?
2. What delivery model do they believe is tailored to their current strengths and assets?  Infrastructure, Platform or Software (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) as a service?
3. What customer segment will they target? Will they target enterprise or  small/medium business? How does this reconcile with their current customer base?
4. How will they monetize their cloud offerings?
5. Do they have the infrastructure to offer these services at the right price point? Can they be competitive based on their current cost structure?
6. How will they fill technology gaps needed to be successful? Key areas like security and compliance.
7. What partnerships will they need to achieve their goals?

The shifting market dynamics do not stop with the service providers. While the service providers are trying to answer these questions the future consumers of their services are busy with questions of their own.  Everybody from global enterprises to small/medium business have to decide what services they will consume from the cloud. The increased adoption of cloud services is fairly universally accepted but what services that adoption will include are not completely clear.

The only thing that is absolute here is that both sides of the equation are aiming at a moving target. It is going to be real interesting to see how both sides evolve together as the cloud computing market matures.

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If you want to hear the podcast of this show, you can download it free from the cloudchasers blog or from iTunes.

Does Social Media Make MORE Sense for B2B Marketers?

I was pleasantly surprised to find my blog mentioned in a post called “5 Good CMO Blogs: Why aren’t there more?” written by John Ellett.

I’m not sure why there aren’t more CMOs blogging but I do have an idea why the majority of the five CMOs mentioned come from the B2B world (as one Robert Lesser pointed out on Twitter):

The crux of social media is conversations between and among people and Business to Business marketing is more about people and their relationships than Business to Consumer marketing.

In the B2C world, the relationship that matters is the one between the consumer and the brand or perhaps more specifically the consumer and the product. Does the brand (company) represent who I am or would like to be. For instance: Nike vs Adidas.  Coke vs Pepsi.  Walmart vs Target.  To me the impact of social media in B2C is among the consumers themselves and their collective and individual relationships with the brands they follow and the products they use.

In B2B,  brands are certainly useful in narrowing the selection process. But when it comes to the actual purchasing decision, it’s all (mostly?) about relationships.

I think the reason for this is that B2B purchases tend to be more enduring and strategic. The decision you make can have an impact on your organization for years even decades. You don’t just buy a thing – a server, an application, or what have you. You also often actually buy a relationship: support services, service levels, integration, consulting. The works.

What concerns you when making a B2B purchase is relationship driven. You are entering into what is essentially a partnership so you want to know if you can count on your future partner. Will this organization or this solution be viable over the long haul? Do they act with integrity? Can I trust them?

Because social media is personal and because it emphasizes connections between people it is an excellent channel for building relationships. That’s why, I believe, it’s a good fit for CMO’s, marketer, and sales people in B2B.

What do you believe?

John

Be sure to check out our other speakers:

Monday, August 30
12:00 pm -  Skip Paul, Appliance Architect, presents on "Virtual Appliances: Simplifying Application Deployment and Accelerating Your Journey to the Cloud”

Tuesday, August 31
2:00 pm -  Richard Whitehead, Novell’s Director of Marketing for Intelligent Workload Management and Ben Grubin, Director of Solution and Product Marketing for Data Center Management, present on “IDC Says: Don’t Move to the Cloud”

For more information, visit Novell booth #931 or VMworld’s conference agenda.

Migration to Windows 7 remains an ongoing challenge for many IT departments. The fact is, while Windows 7 presents great promise- of improved mobility, and more security, networking and search capabilities- the task of upgrading machines and assets can be daunting or organizations of all sizes.   For help, many businesses turn to IT expertise from companies like Novacoast.  A long time Novell partner with a history helping organizations deploy and take advantage of ZENworks, Novacoast is on the frontlines of Windows 7 migration.

Recently Grant Ho, Director Solutions Marketing, End User Computing, caught up with Darrin Sanders, National Sales Manager for Novacoast to discuss the challenges of Windows 7 migration and the successes Novacoast is seeing with its customers. They also talked about Novacoast’s strong partnership with Novell both now and in the future.

For more, listen here:

Guest Post: Doug Jarvis, Product Marketing Manager, Data Center

IDC forecasts that the software appliance market will grow to $1.2 billion by 2012. Skip Paul, appliance architect at Novell, will explain why appliances are growing in such popularity at next week’s VMworld 2010, Aug. 30-Sept 2, 2010, in San Francisco.

Join Skip on Monday, August 30th from 12:00-1:00 p.m. PT to learn why appliances are fast becoming the preferred choice when it comes to deploying and integrating software applications.  His session, “Virtual Appliances: Simplifying Application Deployment and Accelerating Your Journey to the Cloud,” will also cover how the strategic partnership between Novell and VMware is delivering innovative appliance versions of VMware products running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and how they can help enterprises move applications to the cloud.

Skip will demonstrate SUSE Studio, used by ISVs and enterprises to build appliances in minutes for on-premise and cloud environments.

For more information about Skip Paul’s session, visit VMworld 2010 or stop by Novell booth #931 for a one-on-one demonstration of SUSE Studio.  Also, to learn about the first annual “Disters” awards and enter for a chance to win $10,000, go to http://tinyurl.com/2a7wwtq.

Guest post by Wendy Steinle

According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, 50% of companies state they either currently use cloud services or are actively experimenting with them.

While some cloud-based services have gained a measure of acceptance with enterprises, and broad acceptance among consumers, my favorite topic – collaboration – has lately been in the spotlight. While the above Forrester statistic shows the world is definitely turning to the cloud, the question is whether or not enterprises are ready for cloud-based collaboration.

I’ve seen plenty of research that says people in the workplace are using social tools for business. On the flip side, many businesses are blocking access to public social sites for fear of privacy, security, and compliance. According to Michael Fauscette, GVP of Software Business Solutions at IDC “survey data shows that 54% of US companies report blocking access to all public social sites while 57% of employees report using public social sites for business at least once per week".  It is clear that people are looking for something to help them work better together, and the business is rightly concerned about maintaining advantage and staying out of trouble.

When Google recently announced it was ending development of Google Wave, there were many opinions about why and what it meant for the future of collaboration in general. I joined in this conversation with Seth Weintraub, who covers Google for Fortune Tech, on a recent episode of cloudchasers. If you listen, you’ll see that I believe YES, enterprises ARE ready for cloud-based collaboration, BUT the nuance is all in the definition of collaboration and what other elements such as enterprise-class security and compelling use cases must surround it. Hint: Twitter and Facebook don’t = enterprise collaboration.

Of course I wouldn’t put that out there if I didn’t have an answer. You can listen to the cloudchasers episode where we discuss the future of cloud-based collaboration. Download free from either the blog or from iTunes.

guest post — Brian Singer, security solutions marketing manager, Identity & Security, Novell

Recently, a privately held log management vendor, LogLogic, announced that they were interested in having their proprietary log transportation and storage protocol become an industry standard. This is clearly a self-serving power grab with very little substance behind it. LogLogic is doing nothing more than taking a proprietary protocol they have created and attempting to co-opt industry attention by claiming they are making it an open standard.

Novell welcomes open standards and has a long history of working with other vendors to create and support open standards. Standards are not created overnight, and take a lot more than a creative acronym to pull off. Developing an open standard requires buy-in from other industry players with significant marketshare. Last I checked, LogLogic was not exactly the market leader in SIEM. Perhaps, they are thinking, their standard is such a feat of engineering that other SIEM vendors will clamor to adopt it? Not likely as the other large players in the SIEM industry have invested significant sums in optimizing their log collection and storage protocols for their particular architectures. Any amount of re-architecting around the LogLogic protocol would take years and give LogLogic such an advantage that no vendor in their right mind would pursue it.

The fact is, true industry standards exist or are already being worked on. Syslog has been around for a long time, for all its perceived faults. There are two emerging efforts – XDAS by The Open Group and CEE by MITRE – that are working hard to create cross-platform, cloud-interoperable standards that have a real chance of being adopted by the entire industry. Novell is directly involved in both efforts. Both of these are true, non-proprietary, open standards that address forward looking challenges. If LogLogic was truly serious about working with the vendor community to create a real open standard, they would contribute to these projects rather than simply trying to spin their own, proprietary standard into an open standard.

The enormity of the challenge can often overcome even the best intentions.  There can be little doubt that our economy has entered a "new normal".   Yesterday's actions don't yield the same results.  Things take longer than they used to.  Competition is as fierce as ever.  The pace of change is accelerating.

These are but a few of the observations and realities that face many of us in our work and personal lives.  It's no different at Novell.

We've decided to embrace these challenges and Lau Tzu's ancient words that "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step".  In particular we recently launched a company wide initiative called "The Power of One".

In short, the Power of One represents the potential of one step, when combined with others, to make an enormous difference.  We've asked each and every Novell employee to consider how their individual actions, no matter how small, can be better aligned to serving our customers and partners.  We've also given them a forum (via our innerweb) to publicly declare their power of one goal while being encouraged and informed by their peers.  It's certainly not the case that our employees needed permission to act in this way.   But by formally declaring our "Power of One" campaign, we are uniting the interests of all Novell employees to speak and act with one voice, one purpose and one mission.  Indeed reminding all that the best way to climb the mountain is one step at a time.

The Power of One is an important reminder to all that in most things "Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned".

What's your next step?

John

Cloud security is often cited as the biggest barrier to cloud computing, which is why Novell is working diligently to understand and develop security solutions for cloud environments.

We're tackling cloud security issues by building capabilities and offerings targeting the specific concerns of both the consumers of cloud technologies and the providers of cloud technologies. Ultimately, by addressing the needs of both constituents, companies can have a consistent framework for managing identities across physical, virtual and cloud deployments.

On the heels of our Novell Identity Manager 4 announcement – a cloud-ready solution for today’s enterprise – Novell today announced the general availability of Novell Cloud Security Service.  The first security solution specifically built for cloud computing providers.

At Novell, we believe cloud security is comprised of two distinct but inter-related challenges:

1. Cloud providers need tools to address security concerns like user access and managing data in the cloud.
2. Enterprises need assurance that when moving workloads to the cloud. Or, if  adopting software-as-a-service, an IT organization's  security policies should remain consistent both on-premise and in the cloud.

Solving these challenges is not as simple as it sounds.  For enterprises looking to address the cloud security challenges and extend their internal roles, identities and policies to the cloud, Novell offers the combination of Novell Identity Manager 4 and Novell Access Manager to provide seamless provisioning and access management to SaaS and other cloud applications.

For cloud service providers, Novell Cloud Security Service offers a multi-tenant identity and access management solution specifically created for cloud providers with built-in metering, billing and auditing.

We’re interested in what you have to say about cloud security too, whether via commenting on this post, or joining the Cloud Security Alliance group on LinkedIn. We also like this site for good cloud security information and discussion http://www.trusted-cloud.com/

Guest post: Jay Roxe, director of solution marketing, Identity and Security, Novell

Despite some of the buzz in the blogosphere today (see links below),  Intel’s acquisition of McAfee makes sense.  I believe it’s premised on the need to provide security in the growing mobile space.  Intel has a chance to produce some differentiated technology for mobile and that will also flow into data centers.   This surprise acquisition also acknowledges that security is something enterprises expect at all levels of the software stack.  This also validates that security should no longer be viewed as “part” of an IT strategy.   It’s an essential ingredient to every part of the IT ecosystem.

The challenge is that pervasive security is hard.  You’ve got to have the chops to implement the right security policies for your organization. Let’s face it – cybercrime has advanced from being lone wolves and script kiddies to organized crime using military-grade techniques.  Enterprises need to be increasingly worried about their data.  To meet these threats, security must be pervasive throughout the enterprise, and Intel has taken the first step to embed security directly into hardware. Security also needs to be integrated in the operating system, the application and the cloud so that enterprises can log and correlate events to look for rogue activity from either internal employees or external threats.   This takes knowledge, and the right solution providers to help you navigate the complexities of this ever evolving risk landscape.  I’m sure we’ll see others with different takes on how to solve this but Intel has made a bold and interesting move.

Andrew Jaquith's Blog
Threatchaos.com
The Register
Securosis

by Patrick Quairoli, Technical Alliance Manager

On Tuesday IBM completed their roll out of their POWER7 server line. This milestone gave me an opportunity to look back at a humbling realization.

For years I have known that IBM POWER exhibited the key capabilities of reliability, availability and scalability (RAS) which have been tenants of a UNIX platform. I also knew that POWER leveraged key leanings from IBM's flagship System z mainframe to achieve many of those objectives. Additionally, I knew that POWER was a supported platform for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server — in fact SUSE Linux Enterprise was the first Linux distribution to support all of IBM's hardware platforms.

So in early 2010 as IBM began launching their new POWER7 server line up, I did not give much thought about what that meant for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. I knew SUSE Linux Enterprise Server would support the POWER7 architecture much like it had supported POWER6 and its predecessors. I knew our enterprise SAP, DB2 and HPC customers would continue to receive the scalability benefits of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on POWER. I knew that customers could get the same “best of both worlds” benefits of running best-of-breed AIX applications on the same box as best of breed Linux applications thanks to POWER'S ability to create multiple logical partitions or LPARs.

It was not until a colleague of mine from IBM asked me to present the benefits of running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 on IBM POWER that I became amazed about what I did not know. I started by reviewing the release notes to see what was new. I learned about some of the usual suspects like OFED 1.4, FCoE, kernel resource management and improvements to zypper. These are great enhancements to SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP1 but not POWER specific.

Next, I reviewed Novell's feature and enhancements system to see what IBM requested as key support features for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1. What I found was much more interesting: multi-path I/O, active memory sharing, dedicated/shared processors, and huge page size support. All of these features point to availability and scalability of SUSE Linux Enterprise on POWER, but what about reliability?

That is when I came across this study which has a number of nice things to say about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11. What I found was that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server had fewer tier 1 and tier 2 incidents than its competitors, and like its competitors it had fewer than one tier 3 incidents per year. Ironically only the AIX performed better. That leads me to the most interesting find which is the performance of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on POWER.

One of the things I love about IBM is the significant pride they have in their technical prowess. Recently IBM provided a “performance data” tab on each of their server hardware offering pages. What I learned was that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 was able to provide best-of-breed performance for SPEC int_rate and SPEC fp_rate on two socket systems like POWER 730, 740, 4 socket system like POWER 750 and 8 socket systems like POWER 780. It is humbling to fathom an achievement like the POWER 795 which touts 256 POWER7 4.00 GHz processors and 8 terabytes of memory only to turn around and remember that SUSE Linux Enterprise supports 1024 processors and 16 terabytes of memory!

This little investigation lead me to realize there is a lot about IBM POWER and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for IBM POWER that I did not know. But the more I learned the more I understood how IBM was growing its share in the RISC market year over year and why Linux on POWER shows even more promise now than ever before.

Congratulations to my friends at IBM on their POWER7 launch!

Whether they’re working with partners, for clients or within their own enterprise, IT pros repeatedly face challenges keeping information, infrastructure and facilities safe. These challenges – or pain points – can take the form of setting up a consultant who requires read-only access to internal databases or granting employees access to the appropriate applications they need to do their job while also revoking a user’s access to applications when their role changes in the company.  And that doesn’t even take into account servers and networks that demand the highest level protection.

Here are a handful of security concerns identified by an Amplitude Research survey* of 353 network administrators. These ten pain points that IT folks help illustrate that no matter the size of the firm, the issue or Identity Access Management is a consistent concern.

• Granting and securing access for remote consultants and employees
• Identifying and replacing insecure protocols
• Maintaining current virus definition
• System updates and patches
• Education of staff, management and consultants on proper access procedures
• Tracking network logons and use
• Maintaining regular password parameters and ensuring enterprise-wide use
• Sharing data and files securely over both internal and external connections
• Backing up, managing, retrieving and sharing logs securely

Enterprise security – and the methods and software used to monitor and ensure it – impacts every business in different ways. But by recognizing some of the issues faced by many global organizations, most IT departments and professionals can take steps to ensure that their systems are secure, reliable and accessible.

Learn more about network and enterprise security as it pertains to identity and access management at http://www.novell.com/products/identitymanager/ .

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Consolidate Management Tools and Reduce Costs through Federation, While Aligning Service Delivery to the Business – How Can this Be?

What a time to be in the IT management software business, just when you think everyone is consolidating tools and removing tools from their portfolio, in comes a vendor selling management tools. How can a new tool to the environment be a good thing and why would I consider this as a senior IT executive. If that tool can help you to de-dup your environment, add value and remove cost, what is there not to like about that solutions? Read on and see how the right investment can benefit objectives and reduce costs.

As we are square in the summer doldrums and I back from a month's travel, I ponder a couple of things that have come out of my recent travels. Conferences, meetings with prospects and meetings with analysts with similar themes for requirements to integrate or wait on the framework vendors, lock-in with the frameworks or freedom of choice and best in breed, open source management alternatives and alignment to the business and/or consolidation of management tools and a requirement for an integrated view.

Is it possible to spend money to save money? My father always said if it were possible, I would find it or at least be able to come up with the rationalization. I find many organizations are going through portfolio rationalizations, elimintating duplication, seeking savings, staying out of vendor lock-in, but also attempting to deliver higher quality of services aligned with the business. This can only mean an integrated view of the technology infrastructure that is becoming more complex with virtualization and cloud computing. The question becomes where to cut, where to invest and where does the value come from.

The large framework vendors are always a safe choice, they have grown through acquisition and may someday integrate their solutions if nothing else at the database level as this is easiest. I know, I've been a product line manager for one of them and that is always the quick win. This approach does lock you into their solutions and may leave you losing functionality you enjoy from some of the point solutions you have acquired for good reason along the way, but what if there were another alternative to reduce costs, remove tools, leverage best in breed point solutions, AND achieve integrated live views of the environment as the business consumes services. What if this solution also provided future-proofed business alignment by abstracting the integration input from the intelligent modeling and visualization…..sound too good to be true? It is possible today.

Novell provides solutions in the market of Intelligent Workload Management and at the heart of this market is the ability to leverage current and future management technologies and solutions with live views to take action averting business impacting events taking advantage of the wealth of information supplied by your performance, availability, configuration, security tools and business applications. This approach enables you to consolidate duplicate tools. leverage the best of the best and manage my intelligent service models.

I met with a customer who told the best story, there are tools that are good "feeder" tools and there is the overall dashboard view. Be the best "feeder" tool you can be and live in the ecosystem. Monitor availability, performance, configurations and do it well, feed this information into the aggregator who's job it is to make sense of many inputs, determine overall state and provide the dashboard of the services. This is what we at Novell call the Intelligent Service Model at the heart of the Business Service Management Solution.

The beauty of the solution is that it takes input from many sources "live" and enables you to define your business rules by which to take action. This enables you to take advantage of best in breed feeder tools or open source tools, while investing in the view that brings this data together live and enables you to integrate into the Intelligent Service Models the rules that drive your business. It is future proofed in that it does not matter where the data comes from and it can be swapped out as your requirements for monitoring change over time.

It is possible to avoid vendor lock-in, take advantage of best in breed and low cost alternatives and have a live view by which to take action in real time. Tool rationalization can help you to determine where you might leverage low cost alternatives while investing in the value that takes your IT organization to the next level and reduce overall costs.

Take advantage of best in breed and Business Align with Live Views!

Physical, Virtual, Cloud Computing – The Control Never Ends! Check out Novell Business Service Management! http://bit.ly/aOVQrS

• Cool Solutions

… IBM Lab Boeblingen in the category of "RAS" (Really Appealing Series) for their Linux on IBM System z videoclip. First time I saw this "feature" was back in June. I just rediscovered it on YouTube and I wanted to share it with you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i7kBnhN3Lg

Some of you might know that I have an affinity to the cinema, as I have also a masters in science of mass media, cinema and theater. Don't laugh, it isn't that ridiculous as it might seem: the industries of the movies and of IT are quite similar. Both be brutally expensive, are fast-moving and consistently changing, and absolutely merciless if you strike the wrong note or do one wrong step.

No worries, our friends from IBM did all things right here. As leading actors we do not see professional comedians but the IBM heroes Siegfried Langer, Wilhelm Mild, and Hans-Joachim Picht. But the results are impressive – already about 3,500 views on YouTube. And a message well transported. Even if it starts with some kind of "once upon a time", this movie is not a fairytale, but a documentary on how a vision becomes reality. A platform under suspicion of being moldy and old-fashioned demonstrates its cutting-edge nature. Many technologies now being "hyped" originally had been or born or early adopted on the mainframe – think of virtualization, think of "cloud readiness", think of "business continuity".

There is one thing that could be done even better next time. For your next movie, plan also with minimum a supporting if not a leading role for Geeko – and you bet you will sweep the board in the most important categories for IT customers: you´ll hear the "and the Oscars for the categories Best TCO and best ROI go to IBM System z running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z".

• Cool Blogs: Official Novell Bloggers

By Raul Castanon

In a blog post to the Google Community last week, Urs Hölzle, Senior VP of Operations, communicated the company's decision to kill Wave (see Official Google Blog): "Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects."

This announcement left some wondering about the future of Enterprise Collaboration, but market expectations for these applications have never been better. IDC expects that spending on Social Platforms will grow by 35.5% through 2014, making it the fastest growing functional market in Collaborative Applications (1). At this year's Enterprise 2.0 Conference held in Boston (see Enterprise 2.0 – Big Challenges and Exciting Possibilities for Collaboration Software), a number of success stories presented seem to confirm IDC's expectations:

• The number and size of organizations working with Collaborative Applications is growing significantly. Case studies presented included medium size and large companies, in different industries including Education, Consumer Goods and Services.
• Organizations are focusing strongly on metrics to evaluate their impact that these tools have. This indicates that the market is maturing and moving beyond the hype to actually addressing how to use these tools effectively for solving business problems.

Looking at the number of vendors in the expo floor, it is evident that this is already a crowded market with very similar solutions. However, you also get the impression that Collaboration tools have the potential to become a standard business tool for the enterprise and it is difficult not to be enthusiastic about their potential.

The message for the channel in this story is that Collaboration Applications have a huge potential but gaining traction in the market will require working closely with customers and developing best practices for user adoption and solving business problems. This was one of the main problems that Google Wave faced which in addition to security concerns, might explain the low rates in user adoption.

From the case studies we saw at Enterprise 2.0 we learned that the companies that have successfully deployed Collaboration solutions have one element in common, which is an internal or external specialist or team that help identify specific business issues and coaches the organization in the best way to integrate technology to address their business problems. In addition to owning and managing the relationship with the Enterprise, this is a role that the channel can fill for Collaboration Solutions, expanding their practice into adding value to the business solution that technology provides.

To read more about the future of Novell Pulse, read Ian Bruce's recent blog post, The future of enterprise collaboration and tune in for this week's cloudchasers.

(1) Worldwide Collaborative Applications 2010-2014 Forecast, April 2010, IDC #222713