PlateSpin is a software suite of

Micro Focus International Micro Focus International plc is a British multinational software and information technology business based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. The firm provides software and consultancy. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is ...

. Originally a standalone software company headquartered in

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anch ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by to ...

, registered in Delaware, US as Platespin Inc. and founded by Robert Reive in 1999 with co-founders added later David Richards, Bruno Baloi and M. Verdun. Intel corp. via the Intel64fund was a key investor, along with 4Quarters Capital, Castlehill Ventures(Barry Laver) and AltaMira, the latter three all of Toronto, Canada. The original product for which the patent was filed was the Platespin Operations Center, the first usable VM provisioning tool for low cost deployment of servers in their VMs to Vmware ESX and GSX on 64bit processors. Platespin Operations Centre was designed to reduce operations cost and more efficiently use the resources of large servers, as well as deal with routine security patches to software servers and their OS efficiently. Today Platespin is a NetIQ suite of software that helps manage

physical Physical may refer to: * Physical examination, a regular overall check-up with a doctor * ''Physical'' (Olivia Newton-John album), 1981 ** "Physical" (Olivia Newton-John song) * ''Physical'' (Gabe Gurnsey album) * "Physical" (Alcazar song) (2004) * ...

and

virtualized In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, stor ...

server workloads on

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

Microsoft Hyper-V Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded W ...

, KVM, Citrix XenServer,

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide d ...

and

Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure ( , ), is a cloud computing platform operated by Microsoft for application management via around the world-distributed data centers. Microsoft Azure has multiple capabilities such as software as a ...

History

After the 9/11 financial meltdown, PlateSpin's immediate market opportunity shrank rapidly, as most large early customer Opportunity IT budgets were frozen, and as a result the team was disbanded by their major interests in Feb, 2003 and placed in receivership. The first company did win some awards such as a 2003 award from Giga Research as "Most promising new technology in a new category: Software Server Provisioning". Later re-formed by Stephen Pollack in March, 2003 from a Receivership as an Ontario, Canada ltd. numbered company with the same PlateSpin name. A few key members of the original software development, packaging and business development team were rehired to refocus previously created PlateSpin's product line value on a narrower market focus, the converting of physical servers to virtual servers for VMware under the PowerP2V and later the PowerConvert label. The new PlateSpin created two additional products -- PlateSpin PowerRecon to statistically analyze the data center to help prepare for consolidation and PlateSpin Forge, a disaster recovery solution. The re-worked company rapidly grow from $0 to $25M in five years through PlateSpin's reseller/integrator channel networks. Over the 5 years of the new PlateSpin, the company reached the milestone of over 10,000 customers worldwide and had reached global headcount of about 225 employees. On February 25, 2008,

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the le ...

announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PlateSpin Ltd. for 205 million USD. On March 31, 2008, Novell announced that it had completed the acquisition of PlateSpin, which would "become part of the Novell Systems and Resource Management business unit and continue to develop and market its solutions to a global customer base." On May 18, 2011, Attachmate announced that they had transferred the PlateSpin products from their Novell business unit to their NetIQ business unit. In November of 2014, Attachmate completed a merger with Micro Focus International (LON: MCRO), a global enterprise infrastructure software company headquartered in Newbury, United Kingdom. As part of its continued operations streamlining, Micro Focus closed the Toronto, Canada office of PlateSpin and moved all remaining North American operations to the United States.

Products

PlateSpin solutions manage

and

server workloads on

, KVM or Citrix XenServer. PlateSpin Recon (formerly PowerRecon) enables

system administrator A system administrator, or sysadmin, or admin is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems, especially multi-user computers, such as servers. The system administrator seeks to en ...

s to inventory their physical and virtual servers, and catalog resources like

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, a ...

type, amount of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

, disk storage, etc. PlateSpin Recon can also monitor the utilization of these resources over time, and create "profiles" that can be used to facilitate server consolidation initiatives. Support has ended PlateSpin Migrate (formerly PowerConvert) allows

s to migrate workloads between physical and virtual servers in order to match workload to the machine best suited for the job. Support will be discontinued end of September 2021 PlateSpin Protect (formerly PowerConvert) allows

s to protect physical and virtual workloads by creating and maintaining virtual machine copies for

disaster recovery Disaster recovery is the process of maintaining or reestablishing vital infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster, such as a storm or battle.It employs policies, tools, and procedures. Disaster recovery focuses on ...

and

business continuity Business continuity may be defined as "the capability of an organization to continue the delivery of products or services at pre-defined acceptable levels following a disruptive incident", and business continuity planning (or business continuity a ...

purposes. Discontinued - Support ended August 2019 PlateSpin Forge is a hardware appliance that allows

s to protect physical and virtual workloads by leveraging embedded virtualization. PlateSpin Forge includes all of the software, hardware, and storage needed to deploy a simple

solution. Discontinued - Support ended August 2019 PlateSpin Transformation Manager helps

enterprise Enterprise (or the archaic spelling Enterprize) may refer to: Business and economics Brands and enterprises * Enterprise GP Holdings, an energy holding company * Enterprise plc, a UK civil engineering and maintenance company * Enterprise ...

service provider A service provider (SP) is an organization that provides services, such as consulting, legal, real estate, communications, storage, and processing services, to other organizations. Although a service provider can be a sub-unit of the organization t ...

s, and

systems integrator A systems integrator (or system integrator) is a person or company that specializes in bringing together component subsystems into a whole and ensuring that those subsystems function together, a practice known as system integration. They also sol ...

s plan and track large-scale

data center A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommun ...

transformation projects across physical, virtual, and

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

infrastructures. Support will be discontinued end of June 2022

References

External links

NetIQ's website

Micro Focus' website

Micro Focus Product Lifecycle
Companies established in 2003 Virtualization software {{software-stub