VERITAS Continues Linux Push

At the January LinuxWorld Expo 2004, VERITAS made a number of announcements that demonstrate this companys commitment to the Linux space, and the new products have kept coming steadily since then.

One of the major changes is that, while before, VERITAS Linux solutions were only available for Red Hat Linux, support for SUSE has also been added for its core Linux product line--except for NetBackup, which has supported SUSE and Red Hat since v4.5 in April 2002.

When asked whether the initial decision to make this happen was made before or after Novells initial mentions of potentially purchasing SUSE, Ranajit Nevatia (VERITAS director of Linux Strategy) pointed out that this move actually began two years ago and took this long to implement—with the Novell and SUSE news coming merely at an opportune time, perhaps reinforcing the wisdom of this strategy.

Along with expanded Linux distribution support, VERITAS has added enterprise-strength functionality that was missing from their previous Linux offerings. According to Nevatia, a full set of enterprise storage features falls into three major categories: data protection (backup, recovery, and high availability of data in particular), high availability in the broader sense (clustering for failover and better server utilization), and storage management (storage virtualization, filesystems, and volume management). Without support for these three classes, says Nevatia, most enterprise institutions will hesitate to migrate their data fully toward a particular platform. Under the VERITAS banner, at the very least, Linux is now covered.

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