Veritas sets course for utility computing

By Stuart Finlayson

Storage software provider Veritas has unveiled its roadmap for storage management, which it says paves the way for the company to provide a strategic foundation to manage storage across complex, multi-platform, multi-vendor environments, employing a utility computing software model.

Sal Fernando, Veritas' chief technical architect, Australia and New Zealand, said the roadmap was a natural progression of the direction the company has been moving in throughout its lifetime.

"Veritas is not a new company. With the various incarnations of our products over the last 20 years, we have been setting the scene for the utility computing model. In other words, to be able to get access to your information whenever you need it, wherever you are."

The company is working with partners such as Brocade and Cisco on the expansion of its Volume Manager host-based virtualisation technology into the network.

It also plans to expand its volume management offerings with the introduction of SAN-level virtualisation technology, which will allow IT organisations to manage their entire SAN environment as a storage pool.

Fernando said the whole thrust of Veritas' forward strategy is centred around the high expectations users now have of their storage environments.

"The analogy we often use is when you turn on a tap, you expect water to flow, and when you pick up your phone, you expect to hear a dial tone. Similarly, when customers turn on their computer, they now expect whatever information they require access to is readily available.

"To deliver that, we have many underlying technologies that we employ. Key to that has been our storage resource management technology and our volume management and backup technology."

He added: "Going forward, we now have tolls that can utilise any storage you have in your environment, regardless of where you are, and utilise any applications or servers, regardless of where you are.

"Our new roadmap encapsulates what Veritas is about, where we are going, and provides a utility availability model for an organisation's information."

Mark Bregman, executive vice president of product operations at Veritas, outlined what the company sought to achieve.

"Our mission is to provide IT as a service which enables businesses to achieve higher performance and availability at a lower overall cost. Our storage management roadmap is a major building block in our utility computing software solution set, giving customers a clear path to discover and measure storage usage, maximise asset use, and effectively manage their storage network environments."

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