Novell Points To Increasing Private Cloud Momentum

Novell has shrugged off nagging financial issues and concerns over change of ownership, and continues to make news especially concerning the cloud.

At VMworld, the company unveiled its first cloud computing platform, Novell Cloud Manager, which focuses on ease of use so that a non-IT person can deploy it by following instructions, and doesn’t have to write any code.

And then it was later reported that Novell is preparing to sell its Linux server business to VMware. The jury’s still out on that one.

Fast Cloud Adoption

But now on 5 October, Novell revealed the result of its own survey of more than 200 IT leaders (IT director and higher) at “large enterprise organisation” of 2,500 to 20,000 employees. The company found that cloud computing adoption is accelerating much faster than suggested by previous research – particularly involving private cloud architectures.

Here were some of the Novell research findings:

• 77 percent report using some form of cloud computing today; most analysts claim 20 to 40 percent at this time.
• 89 percent believe private clouds are the next logical step for organisations already implementing virtualisation; this is much higher than has been reported in the last 12 to 18 months.
• 34 percent are using a mixed approach of public/private cloud computing; 43 percent are planning to increase their use of a mixed approach; most analysts agree with this conclusion.
• 87 percent believe public cloud computing adoption will occur alongside of company-owned data centres (instead of replacing); this high number is very surprising.

“To keep a [finger on the] pulse [of these trends] is really important, because the information changes so fast that most of the [standard] analyst reports get out of date very quickly,” Novell Director of Data Center Management Benjamin Grubin told eWEEK. “A lot of people cite figures that are six, eight, 10 months old, and in a market changing as quickly as this, it’s important to note the freshness of the information.”

The bottom line is this: Private cloud deployments – not the increasing sales of public cloud services – may well be the most important trend in enterprise IT.

If these survey numbers are close to reality, “this represents a tectonic shift in the perception of enterprise IT management,” Grubin said.

Public Cloud Concerns

If you had asked these questions 12 months ago, he said, the answer would have been “public cloud – I’m going to move my whole enterprise to Amazon EC2.”

Grubin continued, “The market has found that this was an unrealistic goal; too much enterprise IT simply was not ready to be moved outside the perimeter, outside to public clouds. Public clouds were going to take some amount of time to be mature. They weren’t there yet.”

Novell Cloud Manager is “designed for the heterogeneous reality of most IT environments,” which Grubin said “gives users the freedom and flexibility to create and manage private clouds.” Cloud Manager also “supports all leading hypervisors, operating systems and hardware platforms,” the company said.

In an earlier release describing the product, Novell said, “Built from the ground up as a cloud computing management platform, Novell Cloud Manager … [offers] a single, comprehensive console that … business unit leaders, application teams and IT management … can use to request, approve, manage and report on IT services across their entire infrastructure. It is hypervisor-agnostic, which is becoming more important as today’s enterprises increasingly deploy a mix of hypervisors in their data centers.”