BANGALORE, INDIA:
John Stetic, director, product management, systems and resource management, Novell, and Sandeep Menon, country head, Novell, talk to
Deepa Damodaran of
CIOL, on Novell's
virtualization plans with Platespin.
"Today more and more people are moving towards virtualization on first priority and getting into the production space. Thus, with the increased adoption, virtualization is becoming richer in the enterprise environment," says Sandeep Menon.
On the other hand, high levels of adopting is giving rise to a new issue, i.e. how to manage, when there are hundreds of virtual servers. This, in turn, is paving way for the need for better management capability around entire virtualization space and it is here that Novell makes an entry. Excerpts:
CIOL: How does Novell stand apart in the virtualization space?
Sandeep Menon: There are several management softwares in the market today. If you take VMware's management solution or Microsoft's management product Hyper V, we are probably the only enterprise class product that can heterogeneously manage two or three different virtual machines, which is where today data centres are heading towards anyway.
We now have two core product brands - Novell product brands, which focus on end-point management and Platespin product line, which focuses on data centre management.
Platespin, as a product line, is very innovative and cutting edge in the tools it provides to manage the entire lifecycle, starting from assessment of workload, migration, to protecting workloads. Platespin Orchestrate turns a machine into a heterogeneous virtual machine management product, thus enabling you to manage any infrastructure, whether it is VMware or Hyper V.
CIOL: How has Novell's business perspective changed after the acquisition of Platespin?
John Stetic: Till date Novell's customers were either on the security or end user computing side. With Platespin's acquisition, Novell is today moving into data centre management space.
Moreover, at the time of acquisition, Platespin had around 7,000 customers. It continued to acquire more customers obviously with Novell's rich customer base of around 50,000 and also leveraged user-centric products.
These factors are now allowing us to expand, not only in terms of number of customers but also in providing solution to different parts of the business.
CIOL: Virtualization has always been associated with security issues. What is your take on that?
JS: Depending on the type of organization and the way an organization is able to adapt to a change is how they will embrace virtualization. I never had to sell virtualization because customers I deal with have already seen the financial benefits from virtualization.
On the other hand, virtualization is proving to be very successful for us. There are two ways by which I think virtualization will continue to be so.
The first factor is that, virtualization doesn't require any significant change in the way a data centre functions. The way you install an operating system or configure an application, they run exactly the same in a virtual machine as in a physical machine.
The other factor is the financial benefit. People are seeing real ROI by consolidating, reducing hardware purchases, power consumption, heat generation and also save space. Thus there is a huge savings because otherwise building a brand new data centre or squeezing space in any operating data centre would require huge initial capital investment.
Now, by consolidating or making better use of the physical space along with power and flexibility, you can instantly save a lot of capital expenses.
