04.19.08
Do-No-Evil Saturday – Part III: Miscellaneous News from Hypervisors to SCO
This is where a leftover of news should fit rather well. All articles allude to Novell in one form or another. The first item speaks of hypervisors and has Novell mentioned because of its ownership of PlateSpin — the result of of a rather pricey and recent acquisition.
One company that was looking to make this a problem of the past was PlateSpin, now swallowed by Novell. PlateSpin provides virtual image management, and was bringing to market the capability to carry out on-the-fly virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversions from one format to another. This not only makes it easier to provision the function, service or application that is required at any one moment, but also eases image management itself. For example, an application image will need patching or upgrading at intervals. Having just one image that can be provisioned to multiple virtualised environments will be far more manageable than having to patch multiple images, one for each environment.
At the moment, the jury is still out as to how Novell plans to play the PlateSpin card it now has in its hand. The majority of other players have a vested interest in keeping virtualisation proprietary, and Quocirca does not expect to see those who stand to gain a lot of their revenues through the sale of their own hypervisor, or who believe that they can take the big guys on directly, putting in great efforts to ensure full interoperability with other vendors’ systems.
More news about Novell in this context you will find in the following article/blog post.
Novell actually conducted a survey among 411 data center managers last year in conjunction with Lighthouse Research that found approximately 61 percent of companies either use a manual process or no process at all to track server resources. What’s more, almost 80 percent still use manual means to reallocate server workloads.
The Novell-sponsored survey found that 67 percent of data center managers are evaluating management technologies in order to save space in their data centers, while 65 percent were considered power savings. More often than not, you won’t be surprised to hear, virtualization was the mechanism by which they hoped to achieve this. Slightly less than half of the respondents already use virtualization, while more than half of the remaining respondents are evaluating server virtualization for the future.
Here is Novell calling for its channel to specialise a little. This comes from the newly-appointed Michelle Beetar, who took over the operations after a mass exodus of staff.
Novell has realigned itself from being a “pretty direct” company, to a “channel-centric” one. So says Novell SA country manager Michelle Beetar.
Here is a duel involving Domino, GroupWise and Exchange.
Novell still sells GroupWise as well, but along with the rest of the products in the company, Novell is focusing it more now to run on the Linux platform rather than NetWare. (That said, GroupWise will still run on NetWare as well as Linux and Windows.)
Groklaw still keeps an eye on the Novell-SCO court battle, which is handy for those who are patient enough to dig into documents and are sufficiently familiar with the background of this long-standing case.
Here’s Novell’s Opposition to SCO’s Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings on Novell’s Claims for Money or Claim for Declaratory Relief [PDF] as text.
Looking at the week ahead, the local press reveals that Novell will host a meeting.
The Utah Valley Entrepreneurs’ Forum, Omniture, the Open Source Technology Center at Novell, the Provo Business Development Corp., Utah Science, Technology, and Research; and the Utah Fund of Funds will host a free lecture series featuring speaker Josh Coates, who will discuss “Marketing: Press, Analysts and the Interweb.”
Novell seems almost like the centre of attention in this region. █
