SALT LAKE CITY, March 17 -- Novell today announced it will be offering a first look at next-generation datacenter management at BrainShare 2008. This event will showcase the offerings available today from Novell and PlateSpin that deliver complete workload lifecycle management, helping customers plan, provision, protect and optimize their datacenter provided services. These solutions reinforce Novell's ability to harmoniously integrate mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. The combined solutions allow customers to seamlessly move workloads between physical and virtual environments creating greater agility and reducing server sprawl, complexity and costs in their IT infrastructure.

"Today's datacenter is quickly evolving to a mix of physical and virtual resources, often with multiple overlapping virtualization platforms," said Chris Wolf, senior analyst at Burton Group. "A vendor solution which is capable of managing workloads across this mixed IT environment will soon no longer be a luxury, but rather a necessity. True competitive advantage is realized with an IT infrastructure that is capable of dynamically responding to changing business requirements as they occur. If a customer's existing management solution is incapable of orchestrating resources across both physical and virtual infrastructures, then it's time to explore solutions that do."

Together, Novell and PlateSpin offer the only heterogeneous datacenter automation solutions on the market that provide customers the flexibility to manage mixed IT environments. This is another key step as Novell builds out its strategy as a leading infrastructure software company that can make interoperability a reality. Customers can now fully manage the lifecycle of their datacenter. First, analyzing which workloads to virtualize with PlateSpin PowerRecon. Next, converting the workloads from physical to virtual machines, as well as virtual back to physical, with PlateSpin PowerConvert. Finally, converted workloads can be inventoried, categorized and provisioned with Novell ZENworks Orchestrator. This comprehensive approach continually monitors the datacenter and responds to demands automatically, ensuring the most effective and efficient IT infrastructure, while maintaining service level objectives.

In addition, ZENworks Orchestrator brings high availability to the virtual infrastructure, which, when paired with PlateSpin Forge, will allow virtual machines to be continually backed up to provide disaster recovery control. This gives customers an affordable option for ensuring business continuity.

Joe Wagner, senior vice president and general manager of Novell Systems and Resource Management, said, "Both Novell and PlateSpin are committed to interoperability and heterogeneous support for leading operating systems and virtual platforms. With Novell's recently announced plans to acquire PlateSpin, customers will not have to rip out their existing IT investments. Instead, they will continue to have the freedom to choose the tools and systems that work best in their environment, while benefiting from the unique synergies that Novell and PlateSpin offer for managing both their physical and virtual datacenters."

For more information, visit www.novell.com/platespin or www.platespin.com/novell.

About Novell

Novell Inc. delivers the best engineered, most interoperable Linux platform and a portfolio of integrated IT management software that helps customers around the world reduce cost, complexity and risk. With our infrastructure software and ecosystem of partnerships, Novell harmoniously integrates mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. For more information, visit www.novell.com/.

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Source: Novell Inc.