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Novell to Develop Cross-Platform Data Center Tools

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the say-that-ten-times-fast dept.

Anonymous Coward writes to tell us eWeek is reporting that Novell is currently working on a new suite of tools that will assist in the management of data centers across Windows, Unix, and Linux environments. From the article: "The tools also help users maximize server utilization by setting up a series of workload policies based on the business application resources required. The project, currently titled "The policy-driven adaptive data center," will leverage virtualization, identity management and resource management to deliver a flexible and adaptive data center."

36 comments

  1. Let me guess by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You have to run eDir to get all functionality. Pssh, forget it. I am not running eDir.

    1. Re:Let me guess by clydemaxwell · · Score: 1

      Is there a reason, oh AC? Besides the desire not to migrate (not that it's an invalid reason!)

      --
      Browsing with classic discussion, noscript, at -1 and nested
      no hidden comments and I only mod UP
    2. Re:Let me guess by LanRx · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Though you're obviously entitled to your opinion, eDir is easily head and shoulders above AD in every aspect of a directory's usefulness. I actually had a Microsoft guy tell me that replication can take 90 minutes to occur globally. Hope like hell that change wasn't important.

  2. Me Too! by loony · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hey! I also develop a cross platform tool... Its the thing to do - everyone else does it this week!

    Seriously, why would I do that? We have all those management tools that exist already and none of them work... Not even monitoring works. The tools we have (fortune 15 company) cost us millions, and none do what we need. We can't even monitor servers running vmware! VMWare servers have been out now for what? 3 years? And the only one that even claims they can do it is HP - and their stuff is still far from painless.

    Grid, Utility Computing, server solsolidation efforts and whatever you want to call them - it has never worked... and now we have yet another try... *shrugs* Sorry if I'm not excited...

    Peter.

    1. Re:Me Too! by WilsonSD · · Score: 3, Informative
      If you'd like to see an example of this kind of thing working today you should check out Cassatt

      You can also check out this recent article in InformationWeek for an example of someone using it successfully.

      -Steve

    2. Re:Me Too! by RPI+Geek · · Score: 1

      I'll say right away that I don't have much experience with data centers, but it sounds like IBM's Tivoli software might be what you're looking for, except for the price factor. There's a whole load of inventory, monitoring (hardware and software), and event correlation / notification services available for the Tivoli Framework; there's no problem running it on VMWare systems, and it scales very well. I was just wondering if there are extra tools that a data center would need that Tivoli doesn't supply, or if you knew at all.

      --

      - "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
    3. Re:Me Too! by gallwapa · · Score: 1

      HP Systems Insight Manager with HP Virtual Machine Management Pack = Much love to the Network monitoring with Virutalization. We use that here, and it is fantastic.

    4. Re:Me Too! by msobkow · · Score: 1

      Novell has one advantage in developing such a tool: They don't have a proprietary OS anymore to cloud their direction in deciding which aspects are cross platform and which are platform specific.

      Their forte and fortune with Netware was always their administration. It seems perfectly reasonable to try to leverage that experience and redirect it to something with more of a future. They also have existing relationships with pretty much every major OS player, putting them at a distinct advantage over an open source solution whose developers might have a tough time negotiating for access to the internals needed.

      Not every business idea is going to fit every customer -- some won't need or might not like what Novell eventually brings to table. That's the whole point of having choice of solutions -- but given the lineage I'm curious to see what they come up with.

      --
      I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  3. Cross platform tools? by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 4, Funny

    Once upon a time there was a traveller. He travelled all around the known world on foot, by boat, by train, and by car. One day, he bumped into Tim Berners Lee. Tim asked him, "Why do you travel so far to all these places when you could just look at pictures of them on the Internet?" The traveller responded, "Shut the Fuck Up dickwipe. I travel because I like the hardship of having to go different places. I wouldn't get the same excitement and invigoration just doing it all from one spot. There's a world of difference between browsing underage Thai ladyboys and actually going over there and fucking them firsthand."

    The moral of the story is that some people just like to forego the benefits of cross platform browsers and use platform-based tools to do their network management.

    1. Re:Cross platform tools? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The traveler seems a little bit touchy. Perhaps he should take a vacation; get away for a while or something? Oh wait...

  4. This is a digital technicolor yawn by tinkertim · · Score: 3, Informative

    Or in layman's terms baud barf. This has already been done by several companies and exists as open source. OpenQRM is a good example of (almost) the exact thing Novell is going to do.

    IMHO, they're squatting on what's already done and regurgitating it as cutting edge emerging technology. But because they're huge, its news. I use this stuff daily and cross platform management is not rocket science.

    Wow, setup "roles" and "scenarios" and write scripts to change gears based on demand? Sorry but that's not anying 'novel', Novell. Ever heard of ssh key pairing? (sigh). Ever heard of low level portable C? (double sigh). The practice of centralizing control over many servers is as old as Slashdot itself.

    Perhaps they'll make things a little more intuitive. I'm not saying its a bad project, I'm saying market things for what they are and stop squatting on open source.

    1. Re:This is a digital technicolor yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To be honest you are wrong, you state that this is news because Novell is big. I say it's not news at all! Anon y mouse coward submits and scuttlemonkey puts it on the front page, hours later there are still only 30 comments. There's my proof.

  5. its real.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    they are doing it to help all of their customers that upgrade to windows.

  6. Cross-platform development by wysiwia · · Score: 3, Informative

    If Novells means it serious they have to look into wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) for developing cross-platform binary applications and into Dojo toolkit (http://dojotoolkit.org/) for developing web applications. I'm quite sure these are the best way how to do cross-platform development. Besides this might lead to a new future where choosing any platform might not depend anymore on the availability of applications (see http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html.

    For Linux fans read this LXer article (http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/54009/index. html).

    O. Wyss

    --
    See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
    1. Re:Cross-platform development by soren42 · · Score: 1

      Let's be perfectly clear here - when Novell says "cross-platform" referring to Windows and Linux, they mean Mono. As much as it sucks, they usually mean Mono.

      Thanks, Miguel... I'm sure that .NET stuff will offer great performance and stability!

      Don't get me wrong, Mono sounds great in theory - cross-platform, ECMA-based code would be ideal. The problem is, the implementations I've seen to date (cough, cough, Beagle, cough) have serious resource-consumption issues.

      --

      "Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
  7. Market-speak by Bill_Royle · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If I hear the word "virtualization" one more time today, my head will explode.

    1. Re:Market-speak by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      virtualization

      *ducks*

  8. Dilbert's "mission statement generator"... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    ...has the word "virtual" in the list of adjectives, but not exactly the word "virtualization"... http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/games/career /bin/ms_adj.cgi Maybe the Novell marketing team is using Mission Statement Generator v2.0

  9. Sorry by MichaelSmith · · Score: 1

    virtualization

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
    1. Re:Sorry by ggvaidya · · Score: 1

      I get dibs on his UID!

    2. Re:Sorry by Bill_Royle · · Score: 1

      *pop*

      Heck, this UID isn't more valuable than any others really! However, I'd be posting from my other one (in the low 100k's), but I save that one for special occasions :)

    3. Re:Sorry by ggvaidya · · Score: 1

      Eh, it's about 10,000 closer to '1' :p. Good to know our attempts at virtual headexploding were unsuccessful. See ya 'round!

  10. Another day, another press release by FishandChips · · Score: 1

    If Novell got a dollar every time they made an announcement, they'd be making billions by now. This new idea may turn out to be excellent, but it comes over as more jargon piled on top of all the existing Novell jargon: "The project ... will leverage virtualization, identity management and resource management to deliver a flexible and adaptive data center." Yeah, right. Today it's the data center and tomorrow it might be back to talking about mono again. All this talk just suggests that Novell don't really know where they are going. Maybe they should take a leaf out of Red Hat's book, keep quiet and concentrate on growing corporate revenues which is the only thing that will save them.

    --
    Las qué passoun
    tournoun pas maï
    1. Re:Another day, another press release by natd · · Score: 1
      If Novell got a dollar every time they made an announcement, they'd be making billions by now.

      Well, aren't they?

      --
      Only big ligs use sigs.
    2. Re:Another day, another press release by xrepete · · Score: 1

      It's because this week is Brainshare, dude. Apple does the same thing during MacWorld, and M$ does the same thing...whatever chance they get.

  11. Buzzword Bingo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    The project, currently titled "The policy-driven adaptive data center," will leverage virtualization, identity management and resource management to deliver a flexible and adaptive data center.

    "..bingo! I get to leave the meeting early!" *hands in Buzzword Bingo card*

    "Aw, spit! I'm still missing 'paradigm'."

  12. buzzzzzwords by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is the second article with leverage in it in 5 hours! It's become almost as popular as the buzzword terrorist...

  13. They couldn't manage their OWN systems by gkuz · · Score: 0
    This is rich, coming from Novell, which at no time in the last 10 years has had a single tool for managing fscking NetWare servers.

    Don't get me wrong, I've been a Novell fanboi for a long time -- started with NetWare 2.15b, have multiple CNE certs, etc., etc. But they could never make up their own damn minds: Rconsole, NWAdmin, ConsoleOne (yeah, on a workstation, or on a server? Java apps which were "cross-platform" but different), iManage, shit, who knows what else? A pathetic mess pretty much forever.

    Novell, it's over. You were better, but you lost.

    1. Re:They couldn't manage their OWN systems by Ruprecht+the+Monkeyb · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And yet, after going from a Novell environment to a Windows environment, I'd trade certain body parts to have some of the Novell tools back in lieu of the crap that Microsoft ships. It's amazing how much stuff you could do even in pre-3.11 Netware out of the box that you still can't do with native Windows tools.

  14. Only 26 comments ? by cyberchondriac · · Score: 1

    Wow, I can see that interest in Novell is high ! lol

    I take every announcement I read with a grain of salt. Sometimes the whole salt shaker.
    Novell has shifted gears so many times in the past it's hard to get excited about anything.

    Typically, I find that the number of buzzwords used in the marketing hype is inversely porportional to the ability of the product to do what they actually claim.

    At least they've moved nearly all the server services over to the linux kernel though; that's a good base to work from.

    --

    Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
  15. Not surprising by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wow, I can see that interest in Novell is high !

    I was a developer in a Novell house a while back. Their idea of "cross-platform" meant "runs on Netware 3 *and* Netware 4".

  16. Ready already by Basabas · · Score: 1

    Programmers in Azerbaijan almost ready to start using this software.