Now that Novell has acquired PlateSpin the two companies have wasted little time to present what they hope will be an enticing combination of products. It will be interesting to see how suppliers such as Cassatt, Surgient, VMlogix and the like will respond.
Together, Novell and PlateSpin offer the only heterogeneous data center 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 data center. 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 data center 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.
Until I hear of customers using these technologies together, however, I won't know if reality will live up to the promise. Let's see what happens.