Uutility computing infrastructure isn’t bought — it’s crafted slowly over time through a careful IT strategy that includes discovery, consolidation and virtualization.
Often, the challenge of developing these services can be daunting, which is why Veritas Software Corp. has beefed up its service offerings to assist customers with these tasks, the company said at its annual user conference, Veritas Vision, in Las Vegas earlier this month.
The four new areas Veritas professional services will be covering include disaster recovery, storage management, application performance management and utility computing.
One industry analyst said Veritas is taking the right step towards helping customers deploy utility computing by offering more services, but noted that the company still needs to do more to address the portions of utility computing for which it doesn’t supply products, such as security.
Corey Ferengul, senior vice-president, operations strategies at the Meta Group Inc. in Chicago, said Veritas also has yet to define guidelines for designing a utility environment. Additionally, because utility is a concept and not a product, services are the key to devising such an infrastructure. So while Veritas still needs to do more in this arena, these new services provide a good stepping stone for the future, he said.
Veritas also announced the beta release of its Veritas i3 7.0, the company’s monitoring tool. This new release will integrate i3 with Veritas’ Storage Foundation, Cluster Server and Volume Manager, which will give users a better view of application performance, in turn allowing them to better manage application service levels, the company said.
“The key thing is integrating monitoring tools into active tools such as Cluster Manager, Active Manager and Volume Manager,” Ferengul said. For example, this will let users identify that one volume is performing differently from the other, which could affect application performance, he said.
Traditionally, monitoring tools give users insight to what is happening but provide no context, he added. The integration of i3 into Veritas’ other tools gives the users context for evaluating performance levels. Veritas i3 7.0 will be on the market by Q4 2004.
These announcements come on the heels of new CommandCentral products — CommandCentral Storage, CommandCentral Availability plus a new iteration of CommandCentral Service — the company also announced.
At the core of Veritas’ strategy is its belief that heterogeneous environments are superior to relying on a single vendor. It appears that users agree. The company commissioned a survey of 810 IT professionals from the U.S., Europe and the Middle East about their vendor usage. The results indicated that 98 per cent of respondents believed there are cost benefits associated with running a multi-vendor data centre.
Veritas supports many operating systems including Windows, Red Hat Linux, Suse Linux, AIX, UX and Sun Solaris.
