LAS VEGAS – Veritas Software Corp.’s metamorphosis is almost complete. The storage software vendor has taken a leap into the land of utility computing and hasn’t looked back.
On Tuesday, at its Vision 2004 user conference in Las Vegas, Veritas announced new products, available in July, which will assist companies in managing their storage and cluster infrastructures.
Expanding its CommandCentral portfolio of products, Veritas introduced CommandCentral Storage 4.0. This product joins Veritas’ storage area network (SAN) management application, SANPoint Control and its storage resource management software, Storage Reporter, into one product. This will let users view and report on their storage infrastructure, including the desktop, from a single graphical user interface (GUI), Veritas said.
The new CommandCentral Availability 4.0 is for customers running a clustered environment. Enabling users to manage the cluster and have insight into usage is the hallmark of this product. Additionally, CommandCentral Availability 4.0 centrally stores data about cluster activity, which lets users report on and identify trends in cluster usage.
Veritas has also upgraded its CommandCentral Service by adding an automation engine, which users can customize for consistent modeling, publication, execution and automation infrastructure services such as storage provisioning, server provisioning and data protection.
By the end of 2004, Veritas will integrate MicroMeasure — a product it acquired from Ejasent Inc. when it bought the company in January for US$59 million — into CommandCentral Service 4.0. The MicroMeasure component allows for the ability to determine how storage hardware and software are being used by certain users or departments within an organization.
The CommandCentral products will be available in July and will cost US$64,000 for the complete family or separately for US$20,000.
Equally important to Veritas is its support for heterogeneous hardware and software environments. Veritas supports numerous operating systems including Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, Red Hat Inc.’s Linux and Novell Inc.’s SUSE Linux as well as various flavours of Unix, including Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Solaris, IBM Corp.’s AIX and Hewlett-Packard Co.’s UX.
William Hurley, senior analyst at the Enterprise Application Group in Portland, said Veritas’ strategy of supporting heterogeneous networks is of great value to customers.
“Operating systems are rolled out for different reasons and it forces people to make hardware purchasing decisions that don’t match their overall objectives for utilization and optimization,” he said.
As such, he said Veritas’ ability to support myriad platforms is useful to customers who want to buy best-of-breed technologies.
Also, he said customers like to buy management software from companies that don’t provide them with the hardware.
“Having an independent software vendor providing a complement of integrated tools allows end users to keep their vendors honest,” he explained, because they are using an independent tool to evaluate their hardware and software application.
