Novell has agreed to pay $205 million in cash to acquire Toronto-based PlateSpin, which provides software resources for the management of heterogeneous data-center workloads on a single physical or virtual host.
PlateSpins software portfolio is expected to serve as a cornerstone for Novells virtualization strategy for delivering the next generation of infrastructure software needed to power tomorrows data center, Novell executives said.
"Together, we will have the most comprehensive workload-management solution that allows customers to monitor and analyze what to virtualize, provide the tools to seamlessly virtualize and unvirtualize workloads, automate the management of workloads, and provide the leading open-source platform from which to run virtualized work," said Novell Chief Executive Ron Hovsepian.
FROM THE GROUND UP
PlateSpins technologies are designed to improve both the speed and quality of server consolidation, data-center relocation, and disaster recovery. Once the deal closes, Novell expects to offer its customers tools for moving physical workloads to Xen-based virtual machines running on SUSE Linux Enterprise as well as other virtual platforms provided by Citrix, Microsoft, VMware and other vendors.
Novells virtualization platform had been missing some key virtualization capabilities, noted Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon. For example, there was no "good way to assess and monitor which workloads were candidates for virtualization" or stream "virtual and physical workloads," Dragoon said.
Novells platform also needed "an elegant and affordable method for enabling businesses to recover from disasters" as well as protect their data-center workloads from unplanned outages, Dragoon said. "PlateSpins PowerRecon, PowerConvert and Forge products are designed from the ground up to handle those important tasks," he said.
AUTOMATED MANAGEMENT
With its acquisition of PlateSpins technology, Novell said it will be able to provide IT departments with a fully integrated product suite that automates data-center initiatives such as server consolidation, relocation and hardware upgrades. PlateSpins disaster-recovery offerings are also expected to help Novell optimize the balance between physical and virtual infrastructures by automatically making adjustments based on server availability and workload demand, Dragoon said.
"By automating the process and increasing the visibility into how workloads use physical and virtual resources over time, customers will be able to increase server utilization and optimize their data centers by better addressing common workload movement challenges," he said.
Flexible, automated management products that fully leverage server resources and allow the movement of workloads are becoming an absolute necessity for data-center optimization, noted IDC research director Stephen Elliot.
"Over the next three years, heterogeneous virtualization architectures will be the norm for most IT organizations," Elliot said. "As such they must purchase data-center management solutions that offer an ongoing opportunity for lowering operational costs as well as integrating and managing virtual machines across both server and storage infrastructures for greater control and visibility between hardware and the virtual software tiers."
PlateSpin will continue to develop and market its products to a global customer base once the acquisition closes in Novells second business quarter, which ends April 30.
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