Novell is to acquirevirtual datacentretechnology firm
PlateSpin for £103m to enhance its next-generation datacentre
offering.
PlateSpin offers systems for the management of heterogeneous
workloads that encapsulate data, applications and operating systems
residing on a physical or virtual host.
These systems improve the speed and quality of server
consolidation, datacentre relocation and disaster recovery.
Novell and PlateSpin will deliver support for mixed
infrastructure environments, offering products for complete
workload lifecycle management and optimisation covering the Linux,
Unix and Windows operating systems.
Novell said the combined solutions will help 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 optimising the datacentre," said Stephen Elliot, an analyst at
IDC.
"Over the next three years, heterogeneous virtualisation
architectures will be the norm for most IT organisations. As such,
they must purchase datacentre management products 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," Elliot
said.
The acquisition of PlateSpin will provide Novell with extra
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.
Novell said the acquisition will be completed in its second
financial quarter. The firm will announce its first quarter results
later this week.