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Data centres call for heterogeneous management

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CIOL Bureau
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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.

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“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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

CIOL: How do you look at the economic recession? And what is Novell doing to cash in on the scenario?

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SM: The recession plays in favour of virtualization. Technology that inculcates virtualization is cost effective because it helps you to consolidate and utilize hardware better.

Every CIO is today under pressure to see how he can increase the utilization of his expensive hardware from 20-30 per cent to 60-70 per cent. So, a technology that enables it gets a fillip during tough times.

There are three areas that Novell will be looking at:

Consolidation Planning: Novell can help people to make better plans, which allows them to execute those plans much faster in a more reliable way. If you consolidate your data centre faster, you realize ROI much faster.

So, Novell can help people to shrink budget and better manage their budget by allowing them to de-risk some of the consolidation projects by giving them better plans and building tighter plans with less resources.

Virtual Capacity Management: As the virtual machines sprawl, eventually you will need to add new hardwares in order to deal with the incoming request for new virtual machines.

Platespin Recon gives increased visibility into the virtualized space. With Recon, you can understand resources, recapture resources and better utilize the new environment. Thus allowing people to defer from the purchase of new hardware, which is otherwise an additional burden.

Disaster Management. Today people look at protecting their workload environment. They tend to spend a lot of money to protect the top of the system and spend very less for the rest of the system.

We have some innovative ways to protecting entire servers and also give you optimized performance, i.e. how quick you can restore your workload at a very reasonable price.

CIOL: Where do you see the demand coming from, especially during the tough time?

SM: We see a high level of interest in the government, banking and SMB sectors. In the last six months we have seen at least twenty large customers (40 per cent from SMBs) for the Platespin products, which was launched in the India market six-eight months back.

It is an interesting phenomenon because SMBs have always thought that disaster recovery is for large enterprises.

Actually this piece of technology that combines virtualization into disaster recovery, brings it down to the reach of more organizations in Indian market place. It is an enabling technology for an emerging market like India.

Platespin is growing to be one of our strongest product pipelines and we hope to see an increase in demand as we further move into the market.

 

CIOL: What is being done to take the product to the market?

SM: An advertisement campaign is running for Platespin, we are also talking to media, are taking up several marketing activities including e-mail campaigns, newsletter campaigns etc. We are also conducting events, demos and proof of concepts.

The company has identified some partners who are specialists in the virtualization space and we have signed them up as specific point focus partners for Platespin. We are conducting events for customers of these partners.

There is a training and certification programme called CPSA (Certification Procedure for Platespin Technology) and these partners are trained here.

CIOL: What are the challenges in this space?

JS: Virtualization technology is a very hot and new technology and it is still going in a stage where there are now at least three or four major players or technology. Worldwide the maturity cycle is little bit ahead, whereas, India is still in the early part of the maturity cycle.

Different geographic markets are in different maturity curve. Thus, virtualization solution providers can only sell either virtualization solution or virtualization management to only those who are already part of virtualization cycle.

As virtualization adoption is at different levels in different parts of the world, we are trying to develop products that meet different people's need. Thus, in a market that is less mature in virtualization, we are seeing a high demand for Forge because though Forge uses virtualization, the user needs no expertise in the technology.

So we made a distinctive choice at Platespin, that is to only capitalize on virtualization market and have products specified for that market. And we are going to make sure that we have solutions for people that work in a mixed physical virtualized environment, with solution that can standalone just in a physical environment.

There is a good uptake in emerging markets and they have their own distinctive features. The more sophisticated a market becomes, more opportunities for us.

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