Jeff Jane CTO on Novell shares a great post series with us about Novell´s vision about the next level the IT industry needs to reach in order to address the increasing complexity we are facing. They call this the Fossa project and it is intended to be finished by 2012.
So far we have 3 posts that are worth reading:
Novell Key Technologies and Product lines related to Fossa are:
- Virtualization: Xen Virtualization
- Platform: SUSE Linux Enterprise
- Orchestration: ZENWorks Orchestrator
- Identity: Novell eDirectory
- Collaboration: GroupWise (They just bought SiteScape, an OpenSource Teaming + Collaboration suite)
I could not avoid linking this project to the DSI vision pushed by Microsoft. DSI is in its 4th year of development (This is a 10 years vision) and is mainly focused on how will systems management evolve. The Fossa project has a broader vision than only systems management as collaboration is not within DSI. However MS has another vision/campaign called “People Ready” with a pillar centered on Collaboration.
As you saw there are many differences between Fossa and DSI, there are two main concepts where both vision converges:
| Concept | Fossa (Novell) | DSI (Microsoft) |
| Vision & Strategy | The vision is fully aligned with the overall Novell strategy for the next years. | The vision is fully aligned with the overall MS strategy for the next years. |
| Agility | Xen Virtualization + ZENWorks Orchestrator provides an IT platform capable of moving workloads between physical boxes based on current resource usage. | Hyper-V + System Center Virtual Machine Manager + System Center Operations Manager provides an IT platform capable of moving workloads between physical boxes based on current resource usage. |
If you want to go deeper on DSI you could begin with this blog post: Deliver Managed Applications under the MS platform! Develop a custom Management Pack - Prologue and then move to the MS website: http://www.microsoft.com/business/dsi/default.mspx
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