NEW YORK—Veritas Software Corp. announced today Linux versions of its clustering and network-attached storage software, and promised future Linux products for IBMs zSeries server, Oracle Corp.s database and storage resource management software.
“We see some of the largest enterprise clients we have no longer just kicking the tires,” Veritas Chairman, CEO and President Gary Bloom said here in reference to Linux implementations. “Clearly one of our limiting factors today has been the Solaris-only stack for the appliance technology,” and so “we see the same opportunity … as Linux grows,” he said.
“Veritas can now make sense in this area, [but] itll be interesting to see how the cannibalization comes into play,” said Evan Flecker, an analyst with ST Capital Partners here.
The companys Cluster Server is being beta tested by customers such as Amazon.com and The Weather Channel. “We churn on average 4 or 5 terabytes a day of new data. Were very excited to see Veritas come out with a storage management solution that puts Linux in that play,” Bill Watson, manager of systems administration, said in a presentation here.
Meanwhile, Veritas officials said they hope the NAS product—ServPoint—will compete with EMC Corp.s Celerra and Network Appliance Inc.s Filer series, though industry pundits say ServPoint is better aligned for midrange solutions.
Dell Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM and Intel Corp. are also Veritas partners supporting the Linux products. HP and others will make more detailed announcements at LinuxWorld next month in San Francisco, officials said. Upgrades to Veritas storage resource management will come by mid-2003, they said. The Veritas Linux products are not actually open source, according to officials.
Cluster Server is available now, and ServPoint NAS will be available later this quarter, officials said. Pricing was not immediately available but will be comparable to the pricing of the current Unix version.
Veritas has ported several products from Unix/Linux to Windows and vice versa this year, and filling out the catalog is an intentional act, Bloom said as recently as two weeks ago in a quarterly earnings call.
Veritas, of Mountain View, Calif., also announced memory allocation, scalability and networking enhancements to the Linux kernel, which its submitting through partner Red Hat Inc., officials said.