Novell is releasing Version 1.1 of its SUSE Appliance toolkit.
“It s delivering the broadest cloud support of any imaging solution,” enthused Michael Applebaum, director of Linux and appliances marketing for Novell.
“It has The most enterprise use cases. It’s the fastest way to bring applications to the cloud today.”
The new version has a number of important new features, he added.
“We’re adding support for Amazon EC2. You’ll be able to run your SUSE application in EC2. We’re adding support for building those applications within SUSE Studio, the solution that’s part of the SUSE Appliance toolkit. We’re also adding KVM and ODS support.”
Applebaum gave an example of how this will work in practice.
“If you’re a retailer and you have a large network of stores, you want to keep your system flexible by having storage separate from the devices, and having them reboot over the network when you change software.
“Instead of having a complicated store you can then manage it separately and remotely, assuring security, assuring patching, and expanding the use cases.” The company talks about going “from zero to cloud in a month.”
SUSE Studio began as a stand-alone offering a year ago. The idea at the time was that independent software vendors would use it to make their applications cloud-ready.
Applebaum said that over the last year the company has heard from many enterprises who are looking for their own cloud-prep solution “We’re now calling on in house IT shops, because we can package their applications and ready them for any cloud development.”
These remain early days in the cloud era, Applebaum concluded, with people thinking about clouds in many different ways.
“I’m not sure if they’re confusing or equating clouds and boxes per se, but they’re increasingly understanding the key tenets of the cloud approach, and they’re looking for practical solutions that work in an incremental way, without having to have a completely siloed management approach.”
