Forget Donald and Melania, Star and Al. The wedding of storage networking with security under a management canopy is the real headliner for IT.
Security-plus-storage has been the theme of a slew of recent announcements, usually mounted on the soapbox of compliance and/or the emergence of the SMB market. There's simply more data everywhere, vendors maintain, a lot of it making corporations vulnerable, even as it's supposed to keep them honest.
Case in point: When Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) and Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) announced their merger plans, the security/storage union was the backdrop (see Symantec & Veritas: It's a Deal and Veritas: All Systems 'Go'). "The new Symantec will help customers balance the need to both secure their information and make it available," said Symantec CEO John Thompson in the initial prepared merger announcement.
This message prompted a flurry from suppliers insisting Symantec's stealing a show that's been running for awhile with the complainant in the lead, of course. "We have long focused on combining storage and security as a diffentiator," says David Liff, product marketing director for data availability at Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA).
CommVault Systems Inc. agrees. "We think security is important to storage, but not necessarily in the form of virus protection added to file management," says Larry Cormier, VP of marketing at CommVault. The back end of the SAN is a more strategic locus for security, he says.
