At the Veritas Vision conference Wednesday here in San Francisco, John W. Thompson, CEO of Symantec, called for uniting storage and security management and pushed the companys proposed merger with Veritas, while Veritas representatives heralded upcoming product releases.
During his keynote address, Thompson cited the SQL Slammer worm as one of the reasons why storage and security management need to be unified.
I agree that vendors should strive to bring these two key elements together. But even though combining storage and security management brings a significant advantage, and despite having all of the technology parts to do so, a combined Veritas and Symantec faces several obstacles.
From a business perspective, the combined company will have to hammer out disparate licensing arrangements, blending Symantecs subscription-based license plans with Veritas server and add-on license schemes. Based on Thompsons keynote, Veritas and Symantec will try to combine their licenses within six months of the merger.
Thompson also said the companies will work toward creating a common interface that all of their users will be able to use with a minimal amount of retraining.
Far more difficult than that, however, will be the process of integrating the various software pieces in each vendors product line.
The combined products will have to be able to communicate quickly and act decisively when security threats hit, giving IT managers timely advice on how to get compromised systems repaired and online as soon as possible, and limiting the spread of damage to other machines.
Going forward, the combined company also will have to work with network management vendors to prevent possible threats. But even if the merger is not approved, I believe that in the future, storage and security vendors will work more closely together, because data protection and data security are goals that all IT managers strive for.
Veritas Rolls a Pair of Sixes
Based on my talks with Veritas, this summer we should see the 6.0 releases of Veritas flagship backup platform, NetBackup, and its archive solution, Enterprise Vault.
According to Product Marketing Manager Scott Kosiuk, NetBackup 6.0 has been updated with a focus on recovery.
In the upcoming release, expected to ship in August, NetBackup will feature snapshot management for EMC, Microsoft and Network Appliance platforms. Tight integration with snapshot technologies should allow IT managers to quickly recover from data corruption and deletion problems using the NetBackup management console. This will enable them to leverage the technology that comes with their storage systems.
In NetBackup 6.0, Veritas Bare Metal Restore will now be an add-on option (it was previously a stand-alone product), and Version 6.0 will support Linux (previous versions supported only Windows and Unix).
Veritas is targeting a July release for Version 6.0 of its archive platform, said Nick Mehta, senior director of product management for Enterprise Vault.
Enterprise Vault 6.0 will gain archive support for IBM Lotus Domino, SMTP servers and Microsoft SharePoint 2003.
Version 6.0 also will include a new Outlook PST (Personal Folder Information Store) file-location utility, which will ensure that PST files stored on file servers or on users laptops still can be added to the archive. This should make e-mail compliance easier for IT managers.
Enterprise Vault 6.0 will have improved metadata in the archive to make it easier for IT managers and auditors to search for information.
Based on what I saw and heard at Veritas Vision, I believe that, merger or no merger, we should see some significantly improved products from Veritas.
eWEEK Labs Senior Analyst Henry Baltazar can be reached at henry_baltazar@ziffdavis.com.