Novell and PlateSpin present joint solutions at Brainshare

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.

Here's a snippet from their press release.

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.

Snapshot Analysis

Quite a few companies are developing technology that can help organizations move from seeing their datacenter as a number of silos to seeing their systems as a pool of resources that can be dynamically allocated according to their own policies, guidelines and service level requirements and then reallocated as conditions change. Novell and PlateSpin have both offered interesting technology in the past to address parts of the requirements of such a solution. Putting the pieces together is likely to make the task somewhat simpler.

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.