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Veritas Software Corp. is rolling out several tools it says will make it easier for IT administrators to manage, monitor and maintain servers.
The tools—Global Cluster Manager, Cluster Server Quick Start and Traffic Director—will be part of the companys Pervasive High Availability line of products.
The tool kit will help IT managers manage and monitor servers by providing a simpler front end and an API, Veritas officials said.
Cluster Manager will ship in the fourth quarter, with future updates including a WAN version, Wireless Application Protocol support, improved drill-down abilities and an SNMP link.
Quick Start, available now, is a front-end tool for server maintenance, designed for use by junior-level staff with only basic Unix training, officials said.
Traffic Director spans both the application and transaction layers. It will be available next quarter.
Both Quick Start and Traffic Director will be able to run independently or as plug-ins to Cluster Manager, which will sit on Veritas Cluster Server software. Both will be available for Unix, Windows and Solaris machines, officials said.
“We use [Global Cluster Manager] for a variety of things,” said Martin Wegenstein, vice president of operations at Slam Dunk Networks Inc., in Redwood City, Calif. “We have an architecture of geographically dispersed sites throughout the world. We have everything in pairs, everything mirrored. We use Veritas for site failover, as well as failover within a site. It is the most complete failover suite.”
Theres room for improvement, Wegenstein added.
“There are issues in terms of flushing out the pipeline when you do a failover. Thats probably the key one,” he said.
Wegenstein said he will be evaluating Traffic Director and Quick Start. “They are all items which we will be very interested to see,” he said.
Competitors include Cisco Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft Corp., Nortel Networks Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.