Real-time computing. Real-time news.
March 03, 2008
Novell to Buy PlateSpin
WALTHAM, Mass., Feb. 25 -- Novell today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PlateSpin Ltd. This acquisition will extend Novell's leadership position in the next-generation datacenter by providing the only solution to dynamically deliver business critical services across both physical and virtual infrastructures. PlateSpin offers extensive solutions for the management of heterogeneous workloads that encapsulate data, applications and operating systems residing on a physical or virtual host. These solutions improve the speed and quality of server consolidation, datacenter relocation and disaster recovery. Novell and PlateSpin will deliver unparalleled support for mixed infrastructure environments offering products for complete workload lifecycle management and optimization for Linux, UNIX and Windows operating systems in the physical and virtual datacenter. The combined solutions will deliver superior value by helping customers reduce costs, improve service levels and respond to fluctuating business requirements.
"Flexible, automated management products that fully leverage server resources and allow the movement of workloads are necessary for optimizing the datacenter," said Stephen Elliot, research director for Enterprise Systems Management Software and ITMS at IDC. "Over the next three years, heterogeneous virtualization architectures will be the norm for most IT organizations; as such they must purchase datacenter management solutions that offer an ongoing opportunity for lowering operational costs as well as integrating and managing VMs across both server and storage infrastructures for greater control and visibility between hardware and the virtual software tiers."
Optimizing the Datacenter
The acquisition of PlateSpin will allow Novell to offer customers a full solution stack with a powerful virtualization platform and a best-in-class heterogeneous management solution. Together, Novell and PlateSpin will solve many of the datacenter challenges that customers face today, including:
- Relocation: PlateSpin provides a completely integrated product suite that automates the assessment and migration phases of datacenter initiatives, like server consolidation, datacenter relocation and hardware upgrades, to help customers reduce costs, power consumption and space in the datacenter.
- Protection: PlateSpin's disaster recovery solutions offer affordable workload protection that leverages virtualization technology to protect both physical and virtual servers in the datacenter, for improved security and business continuity.
- Provisioning: Using PlateSpin's technologies, customers will have a single approach to imaging and configuring physical and virtual workloads regardless of platform. This eliminates the manual install process and dramatically reduces the time to provision new server workloads. It will also enable customers to address changing resource requirements at peak demand times as well as in test lab scenarios.
- Optimization and management: Novell and PlateSpin optimize the balance between physical and virtual infrastructure by automatically monitoring and making infrastructure adjustments based on server availability and workload demand. 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 datacenters by better addressing common workload movement challenges.
The acquisition of PlateSpin will enable the heterogeneous datacenter with support for leading operating systems and virtual platforms. It will also further enhance Novell's leadership in open source virtualization by providing tools that easily enable customers to move physical workloads to Xen-based virtual machines running on SUSE Linux Enterprise as well as other virtual platforms provided by VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and others.
Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell, 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 datacenter. 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."
Stephen Pollack, founder and CEO of PlateSpin, said, "PlateSpin's ability to manage workloads is unparalleled and is an essential part of making the datacenter truly respond to the needs of the business. Combined with ZENworks Orchestrator and virtualization from Novell, we are very excited about the synergies that this acquisition will give to customers."
Novell will acquire PlateSpin for $205 million using current cash. The acquisition is expected to close during Novell's second fiscal quarter 2008 subject to the satisfaction of closing conditions. Novell will provide an update on the financial impact of the transaction during Novell's first fiscal quarter 2008 earnings call scheduled for 5 p.m. EST on Thursday, Feb., 28. PlateSpin will be integrated into Novell's Systems and Resource Management business unit. As part of this business unit, PlateSpin will continue to develop and market its solutions to a global customer base. This will be done through the continued operation of PlateSpin's Toronto facility, as well as through a combination of PlateSpin and Novell offices and facilities around the globe.
About PlateSpin
Founded in 2003, PlateSpin Ltd. provides a unified suite of solutions to help enterprises adopt, manage and extend their use of server virtualization in the datacenter. PlateSpin's patent-pending conversion and optimization technology liberates software from hardware platforms, allowing servers to be streamed over the enterprise network from any source to any destination. This freedom of movement ensures the best fit between server resource supply and application workload demands. Global 2000 companies use PlateSpin solutions to lower costs and solve today's most pressing datacenter initiatives such as server consolidation, disaster recovery and hardware migration. For more information, visit www.platespin.com/novell.
About Novell
Novell Inc. delivers infrastructure software for the open enterprise. Novell is a leader in desktop to datacenter operating systems based on Linux and the software required to secure and manage mixed IT environments. Novell helps customers around the world minimize cost, complexity and risk, allowing them to focus on innovation and growth. For more information, visit www.novell.com.
-----
Source: Novell Inc.
