John Dragoon’s Blog

Earlier today, Novell announced its intention to acquire data center management leader PlateSpin. PlateSpin is a Toronto based technology company who is singularly focused on providing the most advanced software designed to optimize the use of server resources across the enterprise, both in the physical and virtual environment. This is an extremely important and exciting announcement for Novell and our customers on many levels. In this blog I’d like to offer my perspective on how will it impact both Novell’s strategy and our customer’s ability to respond to their every changing business conditions.

As always, the most important perspective is that of the customer so let’s start there.

We’ve talked for quite some time about our customer’s challenges and their constant need to lower cost, complexity and risk. One of the most talked about technologies in recent memory to accomplish this is virtualization. Historically, every time the business user needed a new service the solution was to provision a new physical server with a single application or purpose which is an inherently expensive, rigid and inefficient approach. Virtualization has emerged to offer new efficiencies and represents another powerful tool in the CIO’s arsenal.

But if virtualization has such tremendous promise, why hasn’t it yet reached its full potential. In a word, complexity. Virtual infrastructures must co-exist with new and legacy physical infrastructures, creating a new set of management challenges including cross infrastructure management, security, provisioning and IT chargeback. From the customer’s perspective, solving these challenges requires answers to the following questions:

• How do you find existing physical workloads that would be better served running in a virtualized environment?
• How do you find virtualized workloads that are consuming a disproportionate amount of shared resources and should be moved to a physical server?
• How can you easily assemble and move workloads between physical and virtual infrastructures?
• How can you manage the entire lifecycle of workloads and ensure sufficient resource capacity to accommodate current and future business needs?
• How do you deliver the right business services and align IT to the business?
• How do you allocate IT costs in the shared resource environment that virtualization enables?
• How do you control and manage growth of the data center when the ease of provisioning virtual machines with no need to purchase new hardware often leads to virtual infrastructure sprawl and management headaches?
• How do you change process and policies founded on principles of the static, physical-only data center to accommodate the new flexibility of virtualization and the realities of a data center that includes both physical and virtual infrastructure?

Great questions and answering these on behalf of customers is one of the keys to creating a more agile, responsive, flexible and of course cost effective IT infrastructure. Providing these answers in an integrated and enterprise class manner was the catalyst behind our impending PlateSpin acquisition. Together, Novell and PlateSpin will provide the industry’s first solution to help customers manage workloads (data, applications and operating systems) across both physical and virtual infrastructures.

So what exactly is the combined Novell and PlateSpin solution for managing the next generation data center? Fair question. In a nutshell it’s a full solution stack with a powerful virtualization platform and a best-in-class heterogeneous management portfolio. But perhaps a bit more detail is in order.

Prior to this planned acquisition, Novell had a leading open source virtualization platform (SUSE Linux Enterprise with the Xen hypervisor)—a platform from which to run virtualized work. We also have an outstanding management platform to manage physical and virtual resources in heterogeneous IT environments, Novell ZENworks Orchestrator. But we could not complete the full management lifecycle. We had no good way to assess and monitor which workloads were candidates for virtualization nor did we have a solution for the seamless streaming of virtual and physical workloads. Finally, we didn’t have an elegant and affordable solution for disaster recover or protecting workloads in the data center from unplanned outages. Enter PlateSpin. PlateSpin’s PowerRecon, PowerConvert, and Forge products are designed from the ground up to handle those important tasks respectively.

Together we now provide customers a solution for the above and more importantly answers to four fundamental workload lifecycle management categories—relocation, protection, provisioning and optimization.

So what’s the business benefit to all this? What’s in it for the customer?

• Lower costs: Data centers can lower costs by reducing their reliance on physical infrastructure as well as the costs required to provision, protect, relocate and optimize workloads throughout their life. Because virtual machines are easy to deploy and re-deploy, customers can provision applications and systems dynamically—moving virtual machines from one server to another as needed.
• Increased flexibility and agility: With heterogeneous virtualization and workload lifecycle management from Novell and PlateSpin, data centers can provision virtual or physical workloads dynamically and automatically on existing hardware to account for changing resource requirements at peak demand times as well as in test lab scenarios.
• Increase server utilization: In many data centers, server hardware utilization is between 5 and 50 percent. Virtualization can improve hardware utilization and significantly reduce server sprawl in data centers. By allowing multiple applications to coexist on one physical server, virtualization enables more efficient use of resources and increases server utilization.
• Reduce power consumption: Data center growth typically increases power consumption, floor/rack space requirements and cooling needs. And because energy costs are increasing, computer energy consumption has become a major concern for data centers. With virtualization and consolidation, you can reduce cooling requirements, lower power bills, decrease management demands and lessen the overall carbon footprint and environment impact of your IT operations. A true “green” solution.

So that’s a small view into the customer perspective. What about the impact and relevance to Novell’s strategy? In a word—it’s an excellent fit for a number of reasons.

Our planned PlateSpin acquisition is a key cornerstone of our stated two-pronged strategy of desktop to data center Linux and IT management software. With this acquisition and the addition of the PlateSpin portfolio, we will be uniquely qualified to deliver the next generation infrastructure software needed to power tomorrow’s data center. Indeed, PlateSpin is a key compenent of Novell’s management blueprint that was announced in 2007.

PlateSpin is also an excellent fit because they share our passion and commitment to two important principles—to be Open and Interoperable. PlateSpin’s value proposition is, at its core, to provide solutions that work across multiple operating systems and virtualization platforms. While we are indeed proud of our open source based virtualization platform in SUSE Linux Enterprise, the fact is that there are many other virtual platforms in use today. PlateSpin’s products work well in all these environments. Indeed, with PlateSpin, we’ll continue to promote our leadership in interoperability and in making IT work together.

You’ll here a lot more about this landmark acquisition in the weeks and months ahead. For now we are delighted to welcome PlateSpin’s 200 plus enthusiastic and passionate employees and thousands of customers to the Novell family. We invite all of you to discover what Novell and PlateSpin, working together, can do for your company.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.