PlateSpin Migrate First to Support Solaris 10 Workloads for Physical-to-Virtual Migrations

Novell today announced the addition of physical-to-virtual migration support for Sun's Solaris(TM) 10 Operating System (OS) in the latest version of PlateSpin® Migrate, the leading workload management product that enables data center managers to move workloads anywhere to anywhere: between physical, image, virtual and cloud environments.

PlateSpin Migrate 8.1 is the leading workload migration product offering support for Solaris Containers, giving customers the ability to migrate workloads from physical to virtual environments. The latest version of PlateSpin Migrate significantly expands the already broad list of platforms supported for physical to virtual migration, by adding support for the recently released SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 from Novell to the existing support for prior versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise. PlateSpin Migrate 8.1 also adds support for Windows* 2008 and Windows Vista*. PlateSpin Migrate now offers the industry’s broadest support for operating systems, hypervisors and hardware platforms in the heterogeneous data center.

The data center is currently undergoing an evolution to become more service-driven, as data center managers require new tools to deliver the business services that users need while maintaining a flexible, automated and cost-effective IT infrastructure. Customers need workload portability – the ability to move a whole workload (the software combination of operating system, application and data) around their data center based on business needs, independent from the underlying physical or virtual platforms. PlateSpin Migrate enables IT organizations to become the ultimate service providers, as they can respond to changing business demands by migrating workloads quickly and seamlessly, while improving their capacity management and asset utilization.

"We expect PlateSpin Migrate 8.1 to make it even easier for customers to take advantage of the power and versatility of Solaris Containers," said Jim McHugh, vice president of Data Center Software Marketing at Sun. "Using PlateSpin Migrate 8.1 to perform physical-to-virtual migration will also help minimize the risk of introducing errors into new configurations and speed the completion of virtualization projects."

PlateSpin Migrate offers support for more configuration options for migrating business-critical workloads than any other solution on the market today. As customers increasingly adopt virtualization for production servers, IT managers need a more powerful and reliable migration tool that minimizes server downtime and maximizes the success of key data center initiatives – such as server consolidation and data center relocation.

PlateSpin Migrate 8.1 makes it easy to migrate workloads between physical servers, image archives and virtual hosts. PlateSpin Migrate also offers performance improvements for business-critical workload migrations, making increased use of block-based transfer technology which transfers only the portion of the file that has changed. This innovation limits the amount of downtime during the migration process, and improves migration performance, especially over slower and expensive WAN connections.

"PlateSpin Migrate 8.1 is the first product on the market to provide the convenience and automation of physical-to-virtual migrations to the Solaris community," said Joe Wagner, senior vice president and general manager of Systems and Resource Management at Novell. "It’s also the first migration product to support SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11. PlateSpin Migrate customers can further reduce cost and complexity in their data centers by consolidating and virtualizing servers, within a single data center or between geographically-dispersed sites, across the broadest range of operating systems, hypervisors and hardware."

PlateSpin Migrate is an integral component of Novell’s PlateSpin Workload Management solutions, which also includes PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Orchestrate, PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Forge®. PlateSpin Workload Management solutions enable customers to profile, migrate, manage and protect server workloads. Only PlateSpin Workload Management supports the Solaris OS, 32-and 64-bit Windows and Linux* servers, as well as all leading hypervisors including VMware* ESX and ESXi, Microsoft* Hyper-V*, Citrix* XenServer, Virtual Iron, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with integrated Xen*. With PlateSpin Workload Management solutions, customers can consolidate and migrate servers across multiple data center locations, balance workloads between physical servers and virtual machines, and protect a larger number of servers with faster recovery using virtualization.

Availability and Pricing
PlateSpin Migrate 8.1 is available later this month. The Windows/Linux version is priced at $289 for a workload license. PlateSpin Migrate for UNIX* is priced at $1,495 for a one-time license. For more information about this announcement, see www.platespin.com/products/migrate/.