Vendor Profile: Reinventing Veritas

Managing It All

Veritas is integrating its new products into a single management console that monitors servers, storage and applications, letting systems managers monitor storage and computing resources from one screen. North says he's been impressed with the previews of Veritas' Command Central management console, especially the automation features. Command Central, which integrates most of Veritas' newly acquired software, can get a busy application the resources it needs--processing power, for instance--from the utility-computing infrastructure automatically. Veritas' new software tools that run with Command Central also manage how and where data and resources are used.

Veritas first announced its intention to pursue utility computing at its annual Vision user conference in May 2003. The company wants to provide IT with an economic way to manage computing resources, says Bob Maness, Veritas' senior director of product marketing. "We are focusing on the delivery of these services as an extension of the products we already offer."

EMC, IBM and Hewlett-Packard already deliver components of utility computing, but such tools are still highly fragmented, North says. And those offerings, unlike Veritas' products, are typically hardware-specific. "Enterprises with a mix of these tools from different vendors don't get the benefit of true utility computing because IT still has to learn how to use each individual package, and there is little or no integration between them," North says. Veritas takes a more integrated approach and is more open because its products run on most hardware platforms, he says.

Veritas' Key Acquisitions for Utility Computing Click to Enlarge