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Veritas Software Corp. this week will launch revamped versions of its hierarchical storage management products for Microsoft Corp.s Windows and Exchange servers.
The solutions are aimed at saving enterprises storage space and money by enabling them to better use existing storage.
Storage Migrator monitors users, applications and disk drives and then archives underused data on less expensive media. For example, software policies enable storage management to be scheduled. If a power user takes a two-week vacation, the software can suspend normal daily backups until the user returns.
Users of the Mountain View, Calif., companys existing HSM software said theyre mostly pleased with the offerings.
“Doc” Malks, vice president of IT at marketing agency Zipatoni Co., in St. Louis, said his companys storage jobs “tend to get very, very large. Were creating [Adobe Systems Inc.] Photoshop files of 2GB, and there tends to be 20 or 30 of those [files] in a single job.”
A year ago, Malks said, he would have expected SAN (storage area network) vendors to fill the HSM need, but he said he hasnt seen it happen. Veritas solution “is certainly not the clean model of a SAN, but its chugging along flawlessly,” he said.
Larry Keminger, director of development at CardioNow Inc., said hospitals subscribe to the Daly City, Calif., companys application service provider service to use its hosted imaging application. The images are about 12MB each, with 200MB to 300MB per patient, he said.
“As our customer base grows, the amount of storage we have grows exponentially,” Keminger said. “Fifteen percent of our total storage is online in the Fibre Channel disk array. We only have it up there for a couple of weeks, and then it gets knocked off [to tape].”
Veritas software has been useful for handling this management, and the pricing model is good as well, Keminger said.
Storage Migrator for Windows and Storage Migrator for Exchange have been rewritten with new code bases, but theyll each be called Version 3.0 to keep in line with the previous, less powerful versions, officials said. A 4.0 version of Storage Migrator for Unix will debut early next year.
Available now, the software costs $5,000 for Exchange servers plus $1,295 for each agent, and $7,500 for Windows servers plus $3,795 for each agent.
Storage Migrator comes on the heels of last weeks announcement between Veritas and Microsoft, when both companies said they will co-develop new products and market toward each others user base.
Such products, details of which are still unannounced, will focus on data protection, officials said, specifically for Microsofts SQL Server 2000 and Exchange 2000 applications.
Microsoft has long been trying to move upstream into Veritas data center segment, and Veritas will target Microsofts stronghold in Windows-centric enterprises.