Virtualization and cloud computing has taken off, despite strong concerns lingering over how companies can secure and manage those apps and data.
Novell Inc. says it can help companies with both sides of the equation, accelerating the creation of virtualized and cloud apps with built-in security.
Over the next year, Novell plans to release eight new products or upgrades to aid in what it calls “intelligent workload management.”
The upcoming Novell Identity Manager 4 will add the new ability for IT managers embed identity management and other security features into both Web-hosted and virtualized apps, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian said in an interview last week.
Novell Identity Manager 4 will arrive by the middle of next year. That will work closely with Novell Cloud Security Service, also due in 2010, in order to extend identity and security policies onto apps and data hosted in the cloud.
These will work closely with a Novell’s Suse Appliance Toolkit, which is due in the first quarter next year. The Toolkit helps ISVs and large enterprises quickly build and deploy virtualized appliances, i.e. self-contained apps prepackaged with a thin operating system layer that can be moved from server to cloud-based server without crash or conflict.
Hovsepian said customers are already starting to use Novell’s existing generation of virtual appliance building tools in a major way.
“In the last three months, we’ve had 40,000 registered users come into our system and build 100,000 different virtualized appliances and workloads,” Hovsepian said. The most popular is a DIY version of the Chrome OS built with Google ‘s browser running on Novell’s OpenSUSE Linux. Hovsepian said that virtual appliance has been downloaded 750,000 times.
Novell is also upgrading its Platespin virtual management product so that users can use it as their single console for managing all of these workloads, whether they are run virtually or hosted in the cloud, Hovsepian said.