On 25 February 2008, Novell stated that it has agreed to acquire the privately owned, Toronto-based PlateSpin for $205 million in cash. PlateSpin, which focuses on software tools to help manage virtualization, will augment the Novell ZENworks Orchestrator and ZENworks Virtual Machine management products for consolidation planning, workload optimization and disaster recovery. All of PlateSpin's 185 employees will join Novell. The deal is expected to close during Novell's second fiscal quarter of 2008.

PlateSpin has been profitable, attaining more than 4,000 customers (some of which have perpetual-based licenses and some of which have term-based project licenses) and approximately $25 million in revenue, as well as more than $10 million in venture funding. We expect that Novell will let PlateSpin operate semiautonomously so that it can gain entry into PlateSpin's broad installed base. The company’s software enables customers to plan and optimize their x86-based virtualized and nonvirtualized server farms. The PlateSpin solution:

• Profiles application workloads, evaluates whether they are virtualization candidates and provides direction on how to consolidate them for optimum resource utilization.
• Can automate the consolidation process through physical to virtual (P2V) migration.
• Enables companies to handle virtual to physical (V2P) migration — an important function often missing from other virtualization providers' offerings. V2P is critical for customer support of independent software vendors (ISVs); for example, when ISVs don't overtly support their products in a virtual environment. V2P also provides flexibility for high availability and optimization.
• Offers hardware-independent image capture and restore (and physical image to virtual image migration) that can be used for migrations and disaster recovery.
• Offers relatively new disaster recovery functions that enable production environments to be virtualized and backed up for disaster recovery testing and implementation.

This acquisition will assist Novell with building up management capabilities for both physical and virtual environments across Linux- and Windows-x86-based systems. Novell's current management product line consists mainly of ZENworks for PC configuration life cycle management. In mid 2007, Novell launched ZENworks Orchestrator, which offers a real-time infrastructure architecture implementation, whereby policies such as CPU and memory utilization can drive dynamic provisioning and optimization of workloads, supporting both physical and virtual (Xen-based) workloads. PlateSpin adds the heterogeneity of virtual machines to ZENworks Orchestrator (for example, adding Microsoft Virtual Servers and VMware to Xen). It also adds additional management entry points for Novell with virtualization — for planning, consolidation, optimization and disaster recovery.

• PlateSpin customers: Evaluate ZENworks Orchestrator for added value in building a more holistic management environment.
• Novell ZENworks Virtual Machine Management customers: Expect to see the current migration capabilities in the product superseded by this acquisition.
• IT organizations with SUSE Linux Enterprise servers: Consider PlateSpin as an enhancement to workload optimization across physical and virtual deployments.
• VMware customers: Run side-by-side comparisons between PlateSpin with VMware Converter (P2V only) in functionality and scalability, as well as considering PlateSpin's V2P or virtual-to-virtual functionality.

Additional research contribution and review: Cameron Haight