Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Novell to Develop Cross-Platform Data Center Tools 36

Posted by ScuttleMonkey 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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Novell to Develop Cross-Platform Data Center Tools More

Novell to Develop Cross-Platform Data Center Tools

Comments Filter:

  • Me Too! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by loony ( 37622 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2006 @03:32AM (#14970071)
    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.

    • Re:Me Too! (Score:4, Informative)

      by WilsonSD ( 159419 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2006 @04:44AM (#14970222) Homepage
      If you'd like to see an example of this kind of thing working today you should check out Cassatt [cassatt.com]

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

      -Steve

    • I'll say right away that I don't have much experience with data centers, but it sounds like IBM's Tivoli [ibm.com] 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
    • 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.

    • 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 o

  • Cross platform tools? (Score:4, Funny)

    by BadAnalogyGuy ( 945258 ) <BadAnalogyGuy@gmail.com> on Wednesday March 22, 2006 @03:35AM (#14970079)
    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.

  • This is a digital technicolor yawn (Score:4, Informative)

    by tinkertim ( 918832 ) * on Wednesday March 22, 2006 @03:52AM (#14970112)
    Or in layman's terms baud barf. This has already been done by several companies and exists as open source. OpenQRM [openqrm.org] 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.

  • Cross-platform development (Score:3, Informative)

    by wysiwia ( 932559 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2006 @04:26AM (#14970182) Homepage
    If Novells means it serious they have to look into wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/ [sf.net]) for developing cross-platform binary applications and into Dojo toolkit (http://dojotoolkit.org/ [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 [sf.net].

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

    O. Wyss
    • Let's be perfectly clear here - when Novell says "cross-platform" referring to Windows and Linux, they mean Mono [mono-project.com]. 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.

  • Market-speak (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Bill_Royle ( 639563 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2006 @04:38AM (#14970209)
    If I hear the word "virtualization" one more time today, my head will explode.
  • 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

  • Buzzword Bingo (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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'."
  • 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.

    • 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.
  • 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 t
  • Programmers in Azerbaijan [basabas.com] almost ready to start using this software.

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close