Storage Acquisitions Beef Up Product, Sevices Offerings

Veritas Software acquired the intellectual property, engineering talent and customer base related to NTP Software's Storage Reporter.

Storage Reporter is a storage management application that offers a detailed view of an enterprise's storage usage, and allows administrators in increase their control over storage-related costs, the officials said.

San Jose, Calif.-based Fibre Channel switch vendor Brocade Communications acquired Rhapsody Networks, a developer of Fibre Channel switches with added management capabilities.

Financial details of the Veritas acquisition were not released.

Rajesh Radhakrishnan, director of product marketing at Veritas, said Storage Reporter offers file scanning and reporting capabilities to provide information useful for storage-quota reporting and chargebacks.

Storage Reporter allows drilled-down reporting and analysis of a customer's storage infrastructure to provide information to predict capacity use going forward. Such information is vital to understanding the cost of storage, said Radhakrishnan. "It's not enough just to run IT as a profit center," he said. "You need to understand where costs are. Storage Reporter historically determines usage today, and predicts needs in the future. This is important information for purchasing storage capacity, since the cost per megabyte is always falling."

The storage reporting capabilities of Storage Reporter complements the storage resource management capabilities of Veritas' SANPoint Control application, Radhakrishnan. "We made the acquisition because of time to market," he said. "We could have developed it ourselves. But customers want it now."

Veritas plans to make Storage Reporter available with the Veritas logo within 30 days, Radhakrishnan said. Over the next six months, it is expected to be integrated with SANPoint Control, while the next 12 to 18 months should see tighter integration with other Veritas applications.

Pat Edwards, vice president of sales at Alliance Technology Group, a Hanover, Md.-based solution provider, said it is interesting that Veritas acquired Storage Reporter so quickly after IBM acquired TrelliSoft last month to beef up the storage resource management capabilities of its Tivoli Storage Manager.

As such applications become integrated into a larger storage management scheme, the big question becomes whether it would be better to offer them as separate service or sell them as a module to the full-featured application, said Edwards.

"You have to have bodies to run that kind of software, and to interpret the results, and our plan was to offer this as a service to customers," Edwards said. "Customers today are doing more with less, and have no time to do anything. They can barely get their backups done. But if the reporting software is sold as a module, customers think they can do it on their own. But if they don't have time to do it right, they lose the value of the software. It's more useful as part of an assessment service."

Last week's other acquisition came because Brocade found a way to increase the intelligence of its switches with Rhapsody's offerings, said Jay Kidd, vice president of product marketing for Brocade.

The Rhapsody platform offers APIs that other developers can use to make applications which take advantage of switching fabric-based volume management capabilities, including the ability to define storage volumes so they can be accessed by multiple servers, said Kidd.

Those APIs also allow applications that enable data mirroring between remote data centers and data replication across sites and between arrays from non-like vendors, all without involving the application server, Kidd said.

Rhapsody has already delivered demo units to a number of OEMs, and is expected to enter the qualification process early next year, said Kidd. Initially, Brocade will sell the Rhapsody switches alongside its own switches, but eventually plans to integrate the Rhapsody technology into its switches, he said.

Rhapsody was in discussion with a number of OEMs, including developers of serverless backup, disaster recovery and storage virtualization software, Kidd said. The company may have already been in discussions with Brocade's switch rivals such as QLogic and McData, discussions which may now be more "awkward," he admitted.

Under the terms of the acquisition, Brocade exchanged 23.4 million shares of its common stock for complete control of Rhapsody, making the deal worth about $175 million. However, final purchase price will be determined on the date of the close of the sale, expected to happen in January.