Roundup: Novell, Juniper, Nimsoft

Here’s a roundup of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

Novell acquired by Attachmate. Novell (NOVL) announced that it has entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Attachmate Corporation would acquire Novell for $6.10 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $2.2 billion.  Acquisition closing conditions include a proposed sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings.  GigaOm and the 451 Group's Inorganic Growth blog talk about Microsoft being the leader in the consortium of technology companies that make up CPTN Holdings. Novell has a large patent portfolio that includes several that are important to Microsoft's Office businesses. "Novell has an established record of innovation, impressive technology and brand assets, and a leading ecosystem of partnerships and talented employees.  The addition of Novell to our Attachmate and NetIQ businesses will enhance the spectrum of solutions we can offer to customers," said Jeff Hawn, chairman and CEO of Attachmate Corporation.

Juniper selected by Tokyo Institute of Technology.  Juniper Networks (JNPR) announced that the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the country's largest and most prestigious science and technology university, has migrated its multi-site campus network to a high-performance infrastructure running the Junos operating system. The university will connect every building on the Institute's three campus sites with 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections, powered by Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches. "We needed 10 Gigabit Ethernet to connect the customer devices with the network edge at the buildings. We also wanted to introduce a simplified network topology while providing a large number of access ports within our teaching labs. We selected Juniper Networks EX series for core and edge switching because of their high port densities," said Katsuyoshi Iida, associate professor at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Juniper also announced that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) is building a high-performance network and data center infrastructure using Juniper solutions.

MTI selects Nimsoft. Nimsoft announced that MTI, a specialist cloud infrastructure consultancy, has selected Nimsoft Monitoring Solutions (NMS) as the foundation for MTI Care, a service that provides clients with comprehensive remote monitoring, alerting and analysis of their VblockT-based cloud environments. "By outsourcing infrastructure to MTI, businesses can substantially reduce capital expenses and shift allocation of IT resources from 'housekeeping' to strategic opportunities," said Aad Dekkers, Chief Marketing Officer at MTI. "With Nimsoft technology, we make this value proposition even more compelling by enabling clients to retain or even improve their visibility into the health of the infrastructure they outsource to us."