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PlateSpin, a Toronto maker of virtualization management and recovery solutions, is about to be bought by Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL), which calls the US$205 million deal a “huge step forward” in its attempt to automate data centre management.

“Our PlateSpin acquisition provides a critical piece in completing our commitment to delivering the best and most complete IT management solutions and platform for mixed IT environments for both physical and virtual infrastructures,” Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian said Monday.

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,” said Hovespian.

For the time being PlateSpin's partner program will remain unchanged.. PlateSpin will continue selling largely through its 20 Canadian system integrators, such as Calgary's Long View Systems and Thornhill, Ont.'s Onx Enterprise Solutions. It also has a direct sales staff for named accounts. The vendor estimates that 70 per cent of its Canadian sales are through the channel. Partners will have the option of joining Novell's PartnerNet program

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.

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