The Art of Managing Application Workloads

Once everything is finally said and done about cloud computing, what will have been added to the enterprise is simply another tier of computing that will have to be managed alongside everything else in the land of enterprise IT.

As that scenario becomes more evident, the discussion is going to shift from where to place our IT infrastructure to the more relevant topic of what types of application workloads should run when on which layer of enterprise computing.

That’s the thinking behind a portfolio of WorkloadIQ products from Novell that allow IT organizations to set policies for any given application workload in terms of where it should run based on its performance and security requirements.

According to Richard Whitehead, Novell director of intelligent workload management, products included under the WorkloadIQ portfolio are SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1, SUSE Gallery and the SUSE Appliance Toolkit, PlateSpin Migrate, PlateSpin Protect, PlateSpin Forge, the Novell Sentinel Log Manager appliance and the ZENworks Configuration Management virtual appliance. Novell plans to ship five additional products before the end of the calendar year, including Novell Cloud Manager, Novell Identity Manager 4, Novell Cloud Security Service, Novell Operations Center and ZENworks 11. WorkloadIQ provides a common framework, says Whitehead, that allows all of these products to be invoked via a common policy engine.

Higher levels of sophistication are going to be required to manage either public or private cloud computing platforms in the enterprise. Novell’s WorkloadIQ approach provides a glimpse of how IT management tools will need to evolve to meet that challenge. But no matter what the approach, the future of IT management is going to be a lot more focused on application workloads versus the underlying systems that tend to dominate conversations about IT management today.