Veritas Bulks Up Storage Foundation Software

Formerly known as Veritas Foundation Suite, the storage management and virtualization software is aimed at tightening the company's ability to offer utility computing across storage, servers and applications, said Marty Ward, director of product marketing for storage and application management at Veritas.

New in version 4.0 is quality of storage service, which increases storage utilization by automatically transferring less important data to lower-cost storage devices without impacting users, Ward said.

The new version also comes with portable data containers, which allow data to be shared between different operating systems. Sharing data in this way enables data created on one operating system to be moved to or accessed by servers running under another operating system, Ward said. This capability is planned to extend to Linux in June or July, and to IBM AIX and HP-UX in the second half of 2004, he said.

Also new are provisioning templates that allow new storage devices to be quickly brought online using configuration templates based on customer needs, Ward said. This replaces the existing process of doing a custom provisioning each time new devices are added, he said.

Veritas is also enhancing the dynamic multipathing capabilities of Foundation 4.0 with five new algorithms to improve performance. Dynamic multipathing spreads the movement of data across multiple network paths to improve performance and reduce the affect of a failure in any network path.

The volume and file-snapshot capabilities are also being enhanced in version 4.0, Ward said. These were options before but are now included with the software. Also, while it used to take several minutes to do a volume snapshot, that function is now instantaneous, he said.

Julie Parrish, senior director of channel marketing at Veritas, said about 600 solution providers are already certified for Veritas Storage Foundation and account for a majority of sales of the application. Direct and OEM sales via Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard account for the rest, she said.

Veritas launched an online training program for Veritas Storage Foundation about 90 days ago, and about 75 people from direct and indirect channels have already started the training, Parrish said.

Veritas Storage Foundation 4.0 is expected to be available this week starting at $2,495.