Veritas Software Corp. on Wednesday agreed to acquire privately-held Ejasent Inc. — a developer of utility computing products — for US$59 million.
The company expects the sale to be closed in the first quarter of 2004, and most of Ejasent’s 21 employees — excluding its founder and CTO, CEO, CFO and vice-president of sales — will be joining Veritas. Both companies are based in Mountain View, Calif.
While Veritas is heavily invested software for the enterprise data centre, the company has been looking to expand the breadth of its offerings to aid companies in building a utility-like infrastructure, said Troy Toman, senior director, product management at Veritas. This means giving users the ability to have greater automation and to more efficiently use their technology resources.
MicroMeasure and UpScale are the two products Veritas will acquire with the deal. William Hurley, senior analyst at the Enterprise Storage Group based in Portland, Ore., said while both of the technologies are still young, they are to his knowledge, unique in the enterprise space.
MicroMeasure tracks physical and logical assets in a the data centre — it tracks the usage of servers, storage, and other devices — by specific applications and user groups, Veritas said.
Customers not only get an immediate benefit from having a deep and granular understanding of the utilization of applications all the way to the CPUs, but they also get the opportunity to begin to think about how to charge their internal customers with this, Hurley said, and perhaps even their external partners.
“[MicroMeasure] really gives Veritas two major benefits,” he continued. “It shows customers exactly how much of their infrastructure they are using, and where those utilization attributes are in their infrastructure. It’s not generalized, it can be very granular and very specific.”
UpScale isn’t as mature as MicroMeasure, Hurley said, but it allows users to make changes to an application, or migrate it in its mission-ready state as opposed to having to shut it down to make modifications. This means users can migrate from one hardware box to another without any disruption, Veritas’ Toman explained. For example, users could switch from a two-processor server to an eight-processor server, or vice-versa, without disruption.
The product will be integrated with Veritas Cluster Server by the second quarter of 2004, while MicroMeasure will be integrated into its CommandCentral Service product. Both products will be rebranded as Veritas UpScale and Veritas MicroMeasure during the first quarter of this year, Toman said.
UpScale is currently only available for Unix, including Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Solaris, Hewlett-Packard Co.’s UX and IBM Corp.’s AIX. Support for Linux is upcoming, while MicroMeasure supports all of these platforms.
