Devoted to hardware, software, IT issues, and information technology management

This is old news from the end of February, but I've only just gotten around to dropping a post on it.  Novell Inc. (NASDAQ: NOVL) has acquired PlateSpin Ltd., a leader in server virtualization and data center management tools.  Novell, best known for the NetWare operating system and top-of-line directory service has lost a lot of traction in the data center to the arguably inferior Windows operating system, as well as UNIX & LINUX and they've been flying under the radar (at least my radar) for quite a while now.

I think this is a great move by Novell to make a splash in the virtualization arena because PlateSpin has a few great products out there:

• Forge is an appliance solution (think hotsite in a box) that provides complete protection for up to 25 server workloads straight out of the box.  In the event of production server downtime or a disaster, protected workloads can be rapidly recovered and continue to run on the PlateSpin Forge appliance until they can be restored to the production environment.
• PowerConvert provides the flexibility to move and rebalance workloads in any direction between physical and virtual hosts.
• PowerRecon is a feature-rich analysis tool that can identify targets for consolidation or virtualization and you can convert IT resource usage data into billable values for chargeback purposes.