Novell Operations Center

Novell spoke to me about the challenges imposed on organizations by dealing with physical, virtual and cloud based workloads and why they've introduced their new product the Novell Operations Center. After looking at this for a bit, it is clear that this is an outgrowth of Novell's current tools and strategies rather than something disruptive and new.

What Novell has to say about what is new in its operations center

New features for Novell Operations Center include:

• Tight integration with Novell identity, security and systems management solutions—In addition to support for many of the industry’s leading monitoring and management tools, Novell Operations Center features seamless integration with:
• Novell Cloud Manager and Novell PlateSpin® Recon to manage service levels for workloads in mixed business service models for private cloud deployments as well as discover virtual infrastructure and initiate workflows
• Novell Sentinel and Novell Identity Manager for marrying security to infrastructure events providing a holistic view to manage service levels and deliver a common identity and access definition
• Novell ZENworks® Asset Management and Novell ZENworks Configuration Management to provide a complete end-to-end view from the desktop to data center
• Integration with Amazon EC2 – Incorporates event management information from Amazon EC2, providing seamless monitoring and management of workloads. In addition, Novell Operations Center helps businesses monitor workloads being deployed to Amazon EC2, thus controlling costs as well as performance of the workloads.
• Flexible packaging – Updated options allow customers to select the starting point for service management that best meet business requirements. Packages include Novell Operations Center – the Engine (includes all modules); separate packages for Service Monitoring, Service Mapping and Service Measuring. All the tools for integration to current and future Novell products are included.

Snapshot analysis

For quite some time Novell has been offering tools that manage identity, security, workloads, systems (could include either physical or virtual) and some really powerful tools allowing workloads to be moved from place to place as needed (workload orchestration.) The company has taken that portfolio of tools and added a new layer on top, a layer that allows the addition of cloud-based workloads to be managed using the tools with which Novell's customer base is now quite familiar.

While the focus of this announcement was the addition of Amazon's EC2, other cloud infrstructure as a service offerings are supported as well.

Novell's customer base will find this new tool very interesting.  It would be worth while for others to examine this as well.