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Novell to mashup management tools

No tea making facilities as yet, though

Now, considering that this is a key differentiator for what Novell is doing to try to make money, Novell just asked everyone to wait a year. For shops that want to mix Linux and Windows workloads and to have a single set of tools to manage their "intelligent workloads," this could work in the long run. But what Novell just told everyone is that it really isn't close to shipping a complete product set. This gives rPath and others plenty of time to jump into the fray if this is something that people really want to do.

Steinman says that Novell is only now sorting out what versions of Windows it will support and would not commit to supporting both Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. As for the Linuxes that will be supported with the IWM tools, the fully integrated set will support only SUSE Linux, either raw through a SLES license or as generated as an appliance through the SUSE Appliance Toolkit. As for other Linuxes, Steinman says "that's not currently in the roadmap."

On the security front, Novell's Identity Manager will get major update to Version 4 from the current Version 3.6 in the second quarter of 2010, adding role-based access to the current user-based access control. The update will also allow for real-time provisioning of access based on individual user identity or roles within the organization, rather than changes to access being done in a batch mode, as they are now. Two other Novell security tools, Sentinel and Compliance Management Platform, will be updated so they understand how to teleport security information around.

Finally, Novell will wrap up pieces of Identity Manager and Access Manager tools and Sentinel monitoring tools with a bunch of new cloudy code - based on programs that have resulted in 80 patents for Novell in recent months. It will sell this to cloud infrastructure providers so that they can have IWM features on their clouds that match the IWM capabilities that Novell will offer for SUSE Linux and Windows. Novell will sell these cloud IWM tools as the Cloud Security Service, and it will be available in the second quarter of 2010.

The manager part of the IWM feature set comes through a rejigging of the existing PlateSpin and ZENworks. There are three components planned. One is a PlateSpin-branded product that is being developed under the code-name "Atlantic," which is a virtual infrastructure provisioning tool based on the current PlateSpin Migrate and Recon tools and a judicious chunk of ManagedObjects technology.

While PlateSpin tools have only been aimed at provisioning and managing virtual servers, a future PlateSpin product code-named "Bluestar" will do provisioning and configuration change management for physical servers. Oddly enough, a whole bunch of the code for this project will come from Novell's ZENworks management tools.

The third IWM management tool project, based on ZENworks as well, is code-named "Workbench" and will be a master repository and change control system for the SLES and Windows workload stacks. All three of these IWM management tools are expected to be delivered in the third quarter.

On the measurement front, the Business Service Manager tools - including myCMDB, which came to Novell by virtue of its ManagedObjects acquisition - and Sentinel will get cloudy extensions and IWM features. The IWM stack itself will get a new tool called Compliance Automation, which will take Sentinel security and event management code and mix it up with the ManagedObjects BSM software to create a single, unified product - presumably at a bundled price. This will also be available in the third quarter of 2010. ®

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