Veritas To Make First Utility Move
Veritas OpForce 3.0, acquired by Veritas with Jareva Technologies last December, is being integrated with Veritas Volume Manager and Veritas File System, said Marty Ward, director of product marketing at Veritas.
Pat Edwards, vice president of sales at Alliance Technology Group, a Hanover, Md.-based solution provider, said the combination is a good proposition for customers.
VERTIAS OPFORCE
>> What: OpForce 3.0 is an automated server deployment application. Veritas integrated Volume Manager and File System so a complete server/storage image can be deployed, cloned and modified in large numbers.
>> When: Expected July 7
>> Why: First app under Veritas' utility computing strategy, announced in May
Edwards finds it easy to justify the cost of provisioning servers with the associated storage. "Today, everyone is trying to manage more with less as their budgets decrease. There's a definite return-on-investment angle for customers," he said. "You want to have another body to do the management, or make it all work with your current administrators?"
OpForce 3.0 automates server deployment, pools server resources, deploys servers on a just-in-time basis, and increases server utilization rates, Ward said. "Today's typical server utilization rate is between 20 and 40 percent," he said. "I can see it double easily."
When OpForce discovers a server, it can make an image of the server's configuration, associated network switches and paths, and the Volume Manager and File System configurations. The image can be used to configure other similar servers. "You can then blast the cloned image to one or hundreds or thousands of servers, all in parallel," Ward said.
Servers can be quickly redeployed, he said, "so at the end of the month, you can turn some Windows into Linux servers in minutes. You can also quickly do patches and upgrades."
OpForce works with Windows, AIX, Solaris and Red Hat Linux platforms, and will soon be available for HP-UX, Ward said.
General availability is expected July 7. For Intel platforms, OpForce costs $7,500, plus $500 per managed server. OpForce for non-Intel platforms is $15,000, plus $750 per server.