PlateSpin, a Toronto maker of server virtualization management and recovery solutions, is about to be bought by Novell, which calls the US$205 million deal a “huge step forward” in its attempt to automate data centre management.
Novell hopes the all-cash deal for the 200-employee private company will close by April 30. He said Novell, with its partners, will be able to help organizations create “the next generation data centre” by allowing Linux, Unix and Windows workloads to work flexibly.
“We’ll be able to marry Novell’s expertise in virtualization, policy management and IT orchestration with PlateSpin’s deep technology solutions around server consolidation, disaster recovery and workload portability.”
A five-year old startup funded by venture financing, PlateSpin makes three products: PowerConvert, which streams workloads between physical and virtual servers; PowerRecon, which analyses available server resources and lets business units charge for virtualized resources; and the just-released PlateSpin Forge, a remote location hardware disaster recovery appliance based on VMware.
Joe Wagner, senior vice-president and general manager of Novell’s systems and resource management division, said PlateSpin’s products fit “hand and glove” with Novell’s open source Xen Hypervisor and ZenWorks Orchestrator, which manages physical and virtual workloads.
“What we were missing were a couple of key pieces,” he said, including PowerRecon’s capability to analyze environments to determine what workloads should be on physical or virtual servers and PowerConvert’s ability to create images for those servers and to move between them.
“It’s a great marriage with no overlap between technologies” of the two companies, he said. PlateSpin already has partnerships with the two leading hypervisor makers, VMware and Microsoft, and Novell doesn’t expect those relationships to change.
John Sloan, an industry analyst with Info-Tech Research of London, Ont., called the acquisition a “strong play” by Novell because as virtualization becomes a commodity, infrastructure software companies will compete on their ability to offer virtual management products.
PlateSpin is a “well-regarded” company, he said, whose physical-to-virtual migration products are widely used. “Outside of what’s offered by VMware, PlateSpin is the tool I come across as being used most often,” he said.
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