Veritas Technologies, which went private Feb. 1 following a sometimes contentious 10-year merger with Symantec, is now out identifying and signing new partners for its already well-established storage and data protection ecosystem.
Western Digital’s HGST division and object-storage startup SwiftStack each announced on April 20 new support for Veritas designed to open new markets for all of them.
HGST’s object-oriented Active Archive System is now certified with Veritas NetBackup enterprise data protection software. It is an Amazon S3-compliant, scale-out object storage system with the ability to scale from 672TB to 28PB of usable capacity.
Object storage is an architecture that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures (such as file systems that manage data as a file hierarchy), and block storage, which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks. Most Internet service providers use conventional file system-driven structured data stores, although the trend is now toward more unstructured storage, including object stores.
Utilizing HGST’s enterprise-class, helium-filled HelioSeal disk drives, the system provides high-end capacity, density and total cost of ownership that aims to replace conventional tape and cloud infrastructures. Utilizing distributed erasure coding, it is capable of surviving an entire data center outage, maintaining a global consistent view and data accessibility from any location, the company said.
Erasure coding is a method of data protection in which data is broken into fragments, expanded and encoded with redundant data pieces and stored across a set of different locations or storage media.
For more information on the HGST Active Archive System, go here.
SwiftStack Object Storage is now listed on the Veritas NetBackup Hardware Compatibility List. Using the NetBackup S3 Cloud connector in NetBackup 7.7.1 and later, users can select SwiftStack Object Storage as a cloud provider, allowing backup data to be written and retrieved from SwiftStack.
SwiftStack specializes in the delivery of private cloud object storage within and across data centers for content delivery, active archive and data-centric workflows. The SwiftStack system, built on OpenStack Swift, is managed by an out-of-band controller and includes scale-out nodes with rolling upgrades as well as a file system gateway interface for conventional applications. HP Inc., PayPal and AutoDesk are among its customers.
Key features include:
—Scalability: SwiftStack Object Storage scales to a nearly unlimited level of capacity and parallel I/O performance. This eliminates storage silos by providing all media servers with access to a common pool of private cloud storage.
—Automatic offsite protection: Nodes in a SwiftStack cluster can be geographically distributed, allowing backup data to be automatically replicated offsite for protection against a major disaster. Using SwiftStack, there’s no need to have a cold tier of disk or tape storage offsite that has to be independently managed.
—Architecturally superior TCO: SwiftStack software runs on cost-efficient hardware infrastructure based on standard servers, Ethernet-based networking and affordable disk drives rather than on more expensive proprietary solutions.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Veritas, founded in 1983 as Tolerant Systems and renamed Veritas Software Corp. in 1989, plays in market segments that in aggregate will be worth $24 billion by 2018, according to IDC and Gartner researchers. These markets include backup and recovery, integrated appliances, information availability and archiving solutions, where Veritas holds No. 1 or No. 2 market-share positions.
Veritas, co-founded by Stanford University professor and investor Mark Leslie, is a longtime supplier of large storage and data backup systems to Fortune 500 companies and others. The company, which positions itself as an information management business that includes both storage and backup, has particularly loyal customers.
“Not only do we serve 86 percent of the Fortune 500, but our 10 largest customers each have been with us for more than 10 years,” President of Worldwide Field Operations Matt Cain told eWEEK. “That says a lot in the current IT environment.”