Chances are you haven’t heard of PlateSpin. Trust me, for Novell, which purchased the enterprise data center workload lifecycle management company, this is a major step forward in moving into the data center.
PlateSpin’s software enables system administrators to move workloads between physical and virtual environments regardless of platform or operating system. It lets companies use whatever servers they already have effectively.
That’s not just hype. Before Novell came along to buy the company for $205-million in cash, PlateSpin counted Citrix, Microsoft, and Unisys as customers. It’s also noteworthy that all these major PlateSpin customers approve of this deal. This is a buyout where the customers aren’t fleeing to another vendor.
In addition, according to Stephen Elliot, IDC’s research director of Enterprise Systems Management Software, this kind of mix and match server farm is going to be a huge market. In a statement, Elliot said, “Over the next three years, heterogeneous virtualization architectures will be the norm for most IT organizations; as such they must purchase data center management solutions that offer an ongoing opportunity for lowering operational costs as well as integrating and managing VMs (virtual machines) across both server and storage infrastructures for greater control and visibility between hardware and the virtual software tiers.”
Specifically, Novell predicted that the purchase of PlateSpin will enable the company to “offer customers a full solution stack with a powerful virtualization platform and a best-in-class heterogeneous management solution.” Novell claims that it will be able to help data center customers with everything from server consolidation, data center relocation, data recovery, and on the fly server provisioning and management.
It will also enable Novell to work not just with customers using Xen virtualization on SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) but with VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft’s virtualization packages. In a statement, Ron Hovsepian, Novell’s CEO, said, “The PlateSpin acquisition will be a cornerstone of our two-pronged enterprise Linux and IT management software strategy. With the addition of the PlateSpin product portfolio, Novell will be uniquely positioned to deliver the next generation infrastructure software that is at the core of the data center. 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.”
PlateSpin will become part of the Novell Systems and Resource Management business after the deal is done. For more information see the new Novell PlateSpin site.