Veritas Software Corp. this week will license much of its storage management software to storage vendors to use as components of their own products, saving customers from integrating it themselves.
By embedding the Veritas software, third-party switch, disk array and HBA (host bus adapter) manufacturers can build in new functions and achieve higher levels of storage networking interoperability.
The initiative, called Veritas Powered and launching at the companys Vision user conference in Dallas, involves partners from Cisco Systems Inc. to startups and applies to Veritas products for virtualization, volume management, file systems, backup/recovery and network-attached storage/SAN (storage area network) enablement, sources said.
The Mountain View, Calif., company also will launch Veritas Enabled, a set of APIs to link its products together and integrate them with third-party products. The program will include IBM and Hitachi Ltd., both of which EMC Corp. has been unsuccessful in drawing into its competing AutoIS initiative.
Veritas and Hitachi officials would not confirm the news. Jeff Goldstein, manager of global Unix infrastructure development at Eaton Corp., in Eastlake, Ohio, runs 40 terabytes of EMC storage attached to Sun Microsystems Inc. servers and Veritas software.
Goldstein is “cautiously optimistic” about the plan, recalling a previous experience as a user of HP-UX, which also had embedded Veritas technology.
“It became such an integral part of the kernel; it might be two or three releases behind what Veritas was doing,” Goldstein said. So now, “theyd have to maintain a stronger level of control over how their code is used,” he said.
Goldstein said he is concerned that if Eaton buys non-EMC storage or non-Sun servers, he might be stuck with those companies software suites. “Im more inclined to look at Veritas software products,” he said.
The initiatives could be a boon or a nightmare for potential partners, especially startups, which often lack business resources despite their technology.
“We really would benefit, [but] if there were other solutions out there, we wouldnt want to feel like we were locked in,” said Jason Caulkins, chief technology officer and founder of Cenatek Inc., a Morgan Hill, Calif., maker of solid-state disk accelerators for SANs.
Also at the Vision conference, Veritas will round out its product line to support the AIX version of the Unix operating system, and Chairman, President and CEO Gary Bloom will present a long-term corporate road map, the sources said.
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