Wedding of the Year

Forget Donald and Melania, Star and Al. The wedding of storage networking with security under a management canopy – is the real headliner for IT.

Security-plus-storage has been the theme of a slew of recent announcements, usually mounted on the soapbox of compliance and/or the emergence of the SMB market. There's simply more data everywhere, vendors maintain, a lot of it making corporations vulnerable, even as it's supposed to keep them honest.

Case in point: When Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) and Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) announced their merger plans, the security/storage union was the backdrop (see Symantec & Veritas: It's a Deal and Veritas: All Systems 'Go'). "The new Symantec will help customers balance the need to both secure their information and make it available," said Symantec CEO John Thompson in the initial prepared merger announcement.

This message prompted a flurry from suppliers insisting Symantec's stealing a show that's been running for awhile – with the complainant in the lead, of course. "We have long focused on combining storage and security as a diffentiator," says David Liff, product marketing director for data availability at Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA).

CommVault Systems Inc. agrees. "We think security is important to storage, but not necessarily in the form of virus protection added to file management," says Larry Cormier, VP of marketing at CommVault. The back end of the SAN is a more strategic locus for security, he says.A host of vendors have their own take on the problem. Decru Inc., NeoScale Systems Inc., and Vormetric Inc. have appliances that can be used alongside switches as well as disk drives or tape libraries. Then there are products from switch vendors and SAN or NAS vendors. And last week, StoredIQ (formerly Deepfile) revealed its appliance is being used for security instead of just file management, and others are following suit (see Deepfile Becomes StoredIQ).

In fairness, none of these vendors claims to be the end-all in security. "You need layers of defense," says Dore Rosenblum, VP of marketing at NeoScale Systems Inc. That view is universal. The issue is how to make it easy to implement multi-faceted security solutions.

Which brings us to another trend – the unification of security and storage in common management products. CA and CommVault are just two examples of vendors aiming to play in this space. Both seek to combine products that already support server, storage, or network management under a common interface. Veritas, too, moved in this direction when it released its Backup Exec suite two weeks ago (see Veritas Announces New Software).

All this is good news, even if the management piece takes awhile to complete (see Detours on the Road to Utopia). Interest in getting security and storage together will hopefully lead to better overall management of IT systems and services.

But nothing's written in stone. What do you think of the Wedding of the Year? Reply below – and take our new poll: Is It Safe?— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch