Veritas Expands Utility Computing Initiative With Software Enhancements

CommandCentral is Veritas' service portal for integrating and displaying information on capacity, usage, cost and service levels for online storage, data protection, servers and clusters.

The portal was enhanced with the addition of two new modules.

Veritas has integrated its SANPoint Control SAN management software and its Storage Reporter storage resource management software into a single solution, CommandCentral Storage 4.0, to offer a complete view of the storage environment, company executives said.

The company also introduced CommandCentral Availability 4.0, an expansion of its Global Cluster Manager to centralize cluster visualization and operational control in order to help meet service-level agreements and improve application availability, executives said.

By integrating the two modules into CommandCentral, Veritas is providing availability to a company's storage and server environments while giving businesses the ability to understand the cost of computing resources, said Mark Bregman, executive vice president of product operations at Veritas.

This understanding is necessary to developing computing resources as a utility, Bregman said. Much like the electric company, a computing utility must provide a way to manage delivery and availability of computing resources and must provide a way to show customers what has been delivered and the cost of those resources, he said.

Also new for CommandCentral is the integration of Veritas MicroMeasure, which Veritas received as part of its January acquisition of Ejasent. MicroMeasure correlates applications to the cost of the servers on which they run as a way of metering the cost of compute resources based on specific applications, Bregman said. As a result, users will be able to allocate costs or provide chargebacks based on resource usage, he said.