Veritas Bares More Metal

Two weeks after Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) kicked off its strategy to manage server resources as well as storage, the company has unveiled its first automated restore product aimed at heterogeneous server environments (see Veritas Automates Recovery).

Version 4.6 of Bare Metal Restore allows companies to automatically recover data from one server to another -- even if the two servers are not identical. That includes servers from different hardware vendors with different network interface adapters, storage devices, video adapters, motherboards, and CPU quantities and types, Veritas claims.

"This allows you to restore to a server with a different configuration," says Dianne McAdam, an analyst with the Data Mobility Group. "That's a pretty tough thing to do."

The new software version, which is based on technology that came with its acquisition of the Kernel Group early last year, is part of Veritas's utility computing strategy, which aims to fully automate the data center (see Veritas Moves up the Stack and Veritas Buys Kernels Original Recipe).

Bare Metal Restore 4.6 offers "dissimilar system restore" technology, which allows users to, for instance, recover Windows systems to completely different target hardware than the source hardware on which it was originally installed. (The servers must be running the same operating system software, however.) Veritas says this reduces the time needed to get the system back up and running, and also allows administrators of heterogeneous data-center environments to do away with the stash of unused systems and parts to match each one of the different server configurations they've been forced to keep just in case one were to break down."They're really trying to separate the hardware from the software, so that you don't have to care what the hardware is behind the scenes," McAdam says. "The software will make it work... That's pretty cool."

This heterogeneous server recovery allows companies to do more than enable the effective and effortless restoration of data, says Bob Maness, Veritas's senior director of product marketing. The software also gives companies a way to automate the migration of data from one server to another. "You could actually migrate your data in a much more automated way," he says. "And you can be confident that it will work."

McAdam says she's not aware of any other companies offering restore software for heterogeneous server environments, but she says other software vendors are bound to follow the Veritas example.

Bare Metal Restore 4.6 also offers a browser-based interface for IBM AIX, HP-UX, Microsoft Windows, and Sun Solaris server recovery and enables general restore capabilities like specific point-in-time recovery of data. This, Veritas says, allows data center administrators to go back to earlier versions of the data, in case the last backup has become corrupt or been infected by a virus.

Every time Veritas's NetBackup software backs up data from the server, it automatically triggers the Bare Metal Restore software to make a point-in-time copy, according to Shawn Aquino, senior product marketing manager for Bare Metal Restore. "This is triggered without user intervention," he says.The enhanced software version, currently in beta testing, will be available in mid-June. Current Bare Metal Restore customers can upgrade from version 4.5 to the new 4.6 for free, while new Windows customers can purchase the software for $900 and new Unix customers can buy it for $1,000.

— Eugénie Larson, Reporter, Byte and Switch