Novell has announced plans to acquire PlateSpin for $205m in cash.

The company said that the acquisition will help to deliver business critical services dynamically across physical and virtual data centre infrastructures.

PlateSpin offers a range of applications to manage data, applications and operating systems on physical or virtual hosts across any combination of heterogeneous systems.

Novell aims to improve the speed and quality of server consolidation, data centre relocation and disaster recovery, helping customers to reduce costs, improve service levels and respond to fluctuating business requirements.

"Flexible automated management products that fully leverage server resources and allow the movement of workloads are necessary for optimising the data centre," said Stephen Elliot, research director for enterprise systems management software at IDC.

"Over the next three years, heterogeneous virtualisation architectures will be the norm for most IT organisations."

PlateSpin's products use virtualisation to assist in the relocation, protection, provisioning, optimisation and management of data centres.

The acquisition should enhance Novell's stake in open source virtualisation by providing tools that enable customers to move physical workloads to Xen-based virtual machines running on Suse Linux Enterprise as well as other virtual platforms from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

Ron Hovsepian, president and chief executive at Novell, said: "The PlateSpin acquisition will be a cornerstone of our two-pronged enterprise Linux and IT management software strategy."

Novell will acquire PlateSpin using current cash reserves. The deal is expected to be completed during Novell's second fiscal quarter of 2008, subject to customary closing conditions.