Day 1/ Session 2

Creating effective e-governance infrastructure

E-governance is not only about IT but it has many non-IT components as well. Having said this, IT infrastructure plays a big role in the success of any e-governance initiative. Dr. P. K. Mishra, Principal Consulting Architect, Novell India, talked about the company’s products and solutions that could help in creating an effective e-governance infrastructure.

Talking about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10/11, Mishra asserted that it has best in class RAS features, can host most popular ISV products, comes with a Virtual Machine Driver Pack, provides enhanced application security using AppArmor, network detection, monitoring, and filtering, comes with certified workloads like SAP and Oracle, and has Active Directory integration, migration tools for UNIX/Windows amongst other features.

Dr. P. K. Mishra, Novell India highlighted the company's products and solutions that help create an effective e-governance infrastructure

For physical and virtual workload migration, Novell has a DR solution, which is claimed to be the world’s first disaster-recovery appliance with embedded virtualization. It protects up to 25 workloads or 2.5 TB out of the box; includes storage, replication software and a remote management interface; it is ideal for medium-sized enterprises or for branch or field use in large enterprises.

Then there is SUSE Linux Desktop, which is the most complete Linux desktop solution in the market covering the entire spectrum of use cases. The solution includes SUSE Moblin, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, SUSE Linux Enterprise Thin Client, and SUSE Linux Enterprise POS. The Enterprise Desktops work with any server—be it UNIX, Linux, Windows, NetWare or Mainframe.

Highlighting Novell’s IT Resources Management tools, Mishra said that these are the tools for monitoring and managing all aspects of server/desktop, including hardware, software, networking, applications, virtualization, etc. It is usable in both GUI and CLI—both local and remote, has scripting to create plug-ins and extend functionality, and management with mandatory and standards based security. Besides, it provides management efficiency even with lower skill levels.

The company also has an Automated Heterogeneous Management solution that can be used for server consolidation, business continuity, and data center optimization. It gives users more control and the flexibility to align business objectives to IT value, features heterogeneous virtual machine management (supports VMware, Xen, and Microsoft VMs), and provides deployment and re-deployment/rollback of virtual machine.

“We also have Business Service Management (BSM), which is a methodology for monitoring and measuring IT services from a business or CIO perspective. It allows IT departments to operate by service rather than by individual configuration items. Touching on all lifecycle processes with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), BSM brings together disparate processes and tools, and creates quantifiable improvements in efficiency,” added Mishra.

In order to optimize a company’s infrastructure, Novell has come up with ‘workload’ which is an integrated stack of application, middleware, and operating system that accomplishes a computing task. A workload is portable and platform agnostic, wherein it can run in physical, virtual, or cloud computing environments. The company also has Intelligent Workload Management that enables IT organizations to manage and optimize computing resources in a policy-driven, secure and compliant manner across physical, virtual and cloud environments to deliver business services for end customers.

Meanwhile, Novell has tasted success in many government/ citizen centric projects including NEGP, Indian Railways, Indian Courts, Indian Police System, and many public funded organizations.