Responding to customer demands to administer storage more in the context of overall IT infrastructure, Veritas Software Corp. this week will announce Service Manager, a far-reaching new master console, which wont be complete until 2005.
Formerly code-named Global Operations Manager, and mentioned but not elaborated on at the same Veritas Vision event in Las Vegas a year ago, Service Manager is the result of several years work, including more than $600 million in acquisitions in 2002, Executive Vice President Mark Bregman (pictured) told eWEEK.
“As you start to go beyond storage… you start to think about this, about service management, in terms of computing utility. Thats not what were delivering today,” he said. But by combining internal development and the acquisitions of Precise Storage Solutions Ltd., Jareva Technologies Inc., and parts of NTP Software Inc.—to manage applications, servers, and files, respectively—Veritas is able to ship an initial such utility by the fourth quarter of this year, he said.
In the first version, targeted for very large businesses, the Mountain View, Calif., firm will manage its existing software for backup and storage management, plus offer the ability to manage competitors backup software, Bregman said. In 2004, theyll integrate management of storage networking and server clusters. In 2005, application management will plug in as well, he said. Midway through the road map, Veritas might build a light version for midsize companies, he said.
Richard Guetzloff, senior director of enterprise systems at R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., controls about 150TB of EMC Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. storage with Veritas NetBackup, Volume Manage and File System. Before learning of the Service Manager road map, “I told them what I was trying to develop on my own with an analyst and a lot of Excel spreadsheets,” he said. “I was actually looking at Precise long before they bought them. I would rather work with fewer vendors,” he added.
“Its time, because we can be much more responsive to business units storage needs, but its also the ability to build cost models of where Im allocating those resources. Were taking on much more work then were getting people to do it. Itd be impossible without the tools,” Guetzloff said, explaining why the printing firm, based in Chicago and with more than 100 U.S. locations and several overseas, needs such a console.
George Demeester, technical architect for government services firm Teranet Inc., currently has different consoles monitoring his storage, servers and network. “We are suffering from not having a console. Even though I added 12 terabytes of disk in December and January, there was no headcount to go with it,” he said, in Toronto. Teranet has 30TB of EMC storage, with Veritas software running and backing up an Oracle database on Solaris. In total, “Ive basically got every operating system under the sun. Thats one of the nice things” about Veritas software, he said. BMC Software Inc.s Patrol didnt meet Teranets needs. Of Service Manager, “a year and a half down the road, Ill see where they are on it,” he said.
Officials did not identify customers whove actually tested Service Manager, but said the product still needs work, especially with compatibility testing. “Theres clearly a lot of digesting to do. Any two customers we walk into are going to have wildly different sets of hardware and software,” Bregman noted. Veritas will work with service companies like Electronic Data Systems Corp. and IBM Global Services to help customers with integration, he said. Software called Business Views will let customers teach Service Managers installation program about their specific environments so it can perform custom configurations, he said.
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