First Veritas Vision Confab Since 2004 Highlights New Info Management Platform, Red Hat Partnership

Bill Coleman

Veritas Technologies Tuesday unveiled an information management platform the company said will help businesses use the cloud as part of a comprehensive enterprise data management solution.

Veritas also used its first Veritas Vision conference since the company was acquired by Symantec in 2005 to introduce a new partnership with Red Hat aimed at helping customers take advantage of OpenStack cloud infrastructures.

The new directions for Veritas were introduced at Veritas Vision, held this week in Las Vegas.

[Related: Symantec Selling Veritas: End Of An Acquisition That Never Lived Up To Promises]

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For Veritas, which in January became an independent company after it was sold by former parent company Symantec to a private equity company, the new offerings are a way to not only show it can compete with its legacy and upstart rivals, but move ahead to where businesses are moving in terms of managing and protecting data, said Veritas CEO Bill Coleman.

The changes are part of a plan to take advantage of Veritas' information management experience and large customer base to become a leader in helping customers prepare for a future that expands far beyond merely moving to the cloud, Coleman told CRN.

That future is about moving beyond information management to a platform that is able to help customers exploit the information for business value, he said.

Such a platform has three characteristics, Coleman said.

"The first is software-defined storage to free our customers from having to depend on the other large guys," he said. "The other part of that is to give them visibility and access to all their data no matter where it is. The second is policy and workflow. And that is to give them the control, management and automation of all their information throughout their life cycle, no matter where it is."

The third, Coleman said, is "a metadata repository for all their information, and the programing environment that would open APIs that would allow third parties to access that metadata, maybe even anonymized, in conjunction with any other data a customer wants to exploit to do things like predictive analytics and machine learning."

Coleman said Mountain View, Calif.-based Veritas as a newly independent company is facing a different future than when it was a part of Symantec.

"What's really changed, and we're in the midst of it accelerating, is the move to cloud, the move to SaaS, the move away from the Capex model into subscription and consumption models. … We're covering all those bases," Coleman said.

To lay the groundwork for such a platform, Veritas Tuesday unveiled a number of significant changes to the company's existing offering.

The first is an expansion to the cloud capabilities of Veritas NetBackup, the company's flagship data protection software solution. Veritas NetBackup, which currently supports customers using Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud environments, will in the near future have new connectors to Microsoft Azure and OpenStack cloud environments.

Veritas is also placing a big bet on open source with the introduction of Veritas HyperScale for OpenStack, a software-defined storage offering the company said will help customers deploy online transaction and other tier-one and tier-two applications to OpenStack environments. Veritas HyperScale for OpenStack will include policy-based workload deployment, off-loading of data backups and snapshots from compute resources, and live workload migrations in case of storage and network failures, the company said.

Also new is Veritas Access, which gives customers seamless access to their data where it resides, including on-premise or in AWS or OpenStack clouds. Veritas Access, which runs on any commodity x86 server hardware, provides policy-based data migration to ensure customers' data automatically moves to the right media depending on access and cost of the storage.

Veritas NetBackup is also being enhanced with Veritas Resiliency Platform 2.1, which can orchestrate the complex recovery of thousands of virtual machines with a single click, including in multiplatform and multivendor hybrid cloud environments.

The company is also integrating Veritas Information Map with NetBackup as a way to provide visibility into a business' unstructured data and assign the proper data recovery policies.

The enhancements, while unveiled at Veritas Vision, are expected to be rolled out to customers and partners over the next few quarters, Coleman said.

As part of its move to embrace open-source cloud development, Veritas Tuesday said it expanding its partnership with Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat to offer predictable quality of service to OpenStack applications and workloads regardless of scale.

The goal of the new collaboration is to ensure that data protection in OpenStack environments is done without impacting production environments, Veritas said.