Veritas Buys NTP Storage Reporter, Aims To Beef Up Analytical Capabilities

The software offers a detailed view of an enterprise's storage usage and lets administrators increase their control over storage-related costs, the executives said.

Financial details were not disclosed.

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. 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 Mbyte is always falling."

The storage reporting capabilities of Storage Reporter complement the storage resource management (SRM) features of Veritas' SANPoint Control application, Radhakrishnan said. "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, the technology will be integrated with SANPoint Control. It will be integrated more tightly with other Veritas applications within 12 to 18 months, he said.

Pat Edwards, vice president of sales at Alliance Technology Group, a Hanover, Md.-based solution provider, said Veritas' acquisition comes on the heels of IBM's move to acquire TrelliSoft last month in a bid to beef up the SRM capabilities of Tivoli Storage Manager.

As such reporting and analysis 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 modules of a 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."