Responding to customer demands to administer storage in the context of overall IT infrastructure, Veritas Software Corp. last week announced Service Manager, a far-reaching new master console that wont be complete until 2005.
Formerly code-named Global Operations Manager, Service Manager (see screen) is the result of several years work, including more than $600 million in acquisitions last year, Executive Vice President Mark Bregman told eWEEK.
“As you start to go beyond storage … you start to think about service management in terms of computing utility. Thats not what were delivering today,” Bregman said.
But by combining internal development and the acquisitions of Precise Software Solutions Ltd., Jareva Technologies Inc. and parts of NTP Software Inc.—to manage applications, servers and files, respectively—Veritas expects to ship an initial version of such a utility by the fourth quarter, Bregman said.
In the first version, targeted at very large customers, the Mountain View, Calif., company will manage a variety of backup and storage management software, Bregman said. Next year, the company will 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, Bregman added.
George Demeester, technical architect for government services company 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 head count to go with it,” said Demeester, in Toronto.
Teranet has 30 terabytes of EMC Corp. storage, with Veritas software running and backing up an Oracle Corp. database on Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris. In total, “Ive basically got every operating system under the sun. Thats one of the nice things” about Veritas software, Demeester said. BMC Software Inc.s Patrol didnt meet Teranets needs, he said. 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 that have 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 said.
Veritas will work with service companies such as Electronic Data Systems Corp. and IBM Global Services to help customers with integration, Bregman said.