Veritas Delivers New Disaster Recovery Products

Veritas Software Corp., today announced its Cluster Server 4.0 and Volume Replicator 4.0, integrated high availability and disaster recovery software with "industry first" features that provide capabilities to test, plan and validate disaster recovery scenarios, without disrupting customers' applications. Together, Veritas Cluster Server and Veritas Volume Replicator provide a solution for high availability and disaster recovery with protection against application downtime and data loss. Cluster server costs $2,995; Volume Replicator 4.0 costs $4,495.

Veritas Cluster Server is an open systems clustering solution designed to minimize both planned and unplanned application and database downtime in heterogeneous environments. It provides local high availability, campus clustering, metropolitan disaster recovery and wide area disaster recovery. The product integrates with Veritas Volume Replicator, a disaster recovery component for data availability at remote sites. The Volume Replicator replicates data to remote locations over any IP network when data loss and prolonged downtime cannot be tolerated.

"One of the reasons behind the new features we are offering is that a lot of companies don't test their disaster recovery plans," said Glenn Groshans, Veritas director of product marketing. "At least a third of all companies don't even have a plan. But of those that do, they don't test them; 72 percent don't, in fact." One reason companies don't test is the difficulty of that task, particularly in the production environment, where an outage caused by a test can be especially disruptive.

"The other thing we see is that people make changes to their environment ... they add additional servers or applications, and they don't retest," said Groshans.

Veritas considered the common reasons for reluctance to test a disaster recovery plan when coming up with the new features in Veritas Cluster Server 4.0 and Veritas Volume Replicator 4.0. Key components include: