Veritas Stretches Beyond Storage

To help grow utility computing out of its infancy, Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) is looking to obtain more outside technology, while continuing to launch new products based on what they've already got.

By investigating and possibly acquiring technology related to networking and security management, and by shoring up in areas like workload management and application failover, Veritas will help customers reach the utility utopia, says Mike Tardif, VP of utility infrastructure products.

The trip is just beginning. "We're 3 to 5 percent into utility and delivering products, compared to Veritas's long-term goals," he says. "The rest is services, and IT [users] need to do some business process re-engineering."

But what is utility computing? "It's integration and automation to drive out hardware and people costs," Tardif says. To users, that may be a utopian ideal, but to Veritas, it's also a way to escape being just a storage management company, according to Tardif.

Veritas has already spent more than $730 million on non-storage software companies, such Ejasent Inc., Invio Software Inc., Jareva Technologies Inc., Precise Software Solutions Ltd., and others. The integration of all those tools will arrive early next year in a point release to the recently launched CommandCentral 4.0, Tardif says.Here's how they all work together in a data center, using CommandCentral as the entry point. Provisioning new IT gear begins with the former Precise technology, which checks for the proper privileges against service-level agreements in CommandCentral. The former Invio workflow programs can do the actual provisioning into clusters managed by the former Jareva tools. Meanwhile, the former Ejasent technology conducts the application management, Tardif explains.

Veritas will also upgrade its Cluster Manager software. "We're moving from a maximum of 32 nodes to 256 modes. The architecture will do 1,024, but it's a matter of testing," he says. The 256-node version will debut this fall.

Brad Wood, director of enterprise services at Corrections Corp. of America, a designer and manager of jails, says he switched from Computer Associates International Inc. (CA)'s (NYSE: CA) software management products to Veritas's about 18 months ago. "CA wasn't meeting my needs," he says, so he's since joined Veritas's customer advisory board. Speaking of utility computing, Wood says, "I feel like it's extremely important. It's going to be critical that all data becomes virtualized. I think they're going down the right road, including the plans to delve into network and security management."

As for clustering, Veritas is doing the right thing, and it's just in time, Wood says. "Right now with the 32-node limit I can get some, but I can't do everything. It's not handcuffed me but in six to 12 months it will." Corrections Corp. clusters Oracle 9i and Oracle 10g databases and will soon use clustering for a disaster recovery site, he says.

Built or bought, Veritas's latest and future features will all link back into CommandCentral. "This portal, which is finally more than veneer, will pop up [from just storage management] to the CTO and I think the data center level," Tardif says. And when that happens, according to Tardif, Veritas won't be a company just for IT nerds anymore.Evan Koblentz, Senior Nerd, Next-Gen Data Center Forum