In keeping with its reputation of supporting major operating releases quickly, Veritas has announced that its storage management and high-availability products now support Sun Microsystems Solaris 10 operating system, effective immediately.
The Mountain View, Calif., companys Storage Foundation, Volume Replicator and Cluster Server all have been revamped to include full support for Solaris 10 to meet customer demand, said Matt Fairbanks, director of product management for Veritas Software Corp.s storage and server management group.
“We have a huge installed base on the Solaris platform, and this is a major release from Sun [Microsystems Inc.],” he said.
“We have a commitment that within 90 days of a major operating system shipping, our main storage foundation and high-availability stack will be running on that operating environment. Our customers see real benefit from being able to standardize across Solaris, HP, Windows and Linux.”
The ability to work across platforms, in fact, is one of Veritas key strengths, making it particularly important for the company to keep up with the latest operating-systems releases, said Gordon Haff, a senior analyst at Illuminata Inc. of Nashua, N.H.
“The fact is that customers with heterogeneous environments really like Veritas because it runs across so many platforms,” he said.
Veritas Storage Foundation 4.1 now supports all features and functions included in Solaris 10, including Solaris Containers—Suns way of creating multiple, isolated environments on one physical server. Storage Foundation 4.1 also supports DTrace, a feature that helps users diagnose and resolve problems, and it includes new security functionality.
The product also is being shipped with a full API and SDK (software development kit) that allows ISVs and customers to write application that take full advantage of Veritas storage foundation.
“Were being very open about whats going on with our storage foundation, exposing metadata tags and things they can take advantage of to get better performance, manageability and storage tiering,” Fairbanks said.
Resident in Volume Replicator 4.1 is the ability to throttle or control bandwidth on a more granular basis, allowing users to use shared networks or scarce bandwidth with more control.
“You can set different thresholds in terms of how much bandwidth you want to use for your replication, so you can set a policy and Volume Replicator will comply with it,” Fairbanks said.
Veritas Cluster Server 4.1 offers greater levels of data availability for applications, databases and servers, as well as more protection against downtime in Solaris 10 environments. It also allows systems greater capabilities to fail over, migrate and cluster applications across servers, zones and partitioned virtual servers within a large system, as well as supporting new types of containers now supported by Solaris 10.
Although Veritas clearly did the right thing by quickly supporting Solaris 10, it also had no choice, Haff said.
“Veritas is an important ISV partner for Sun, and Solaris is an important platform for Veritas,” he said.
As for Veritas, its business as usual. The company plans to continue supporting new operating-system releases, including the upcoming Red Hat Linux 4.0 and new Windows technology that will ship later this year.
