Veritas Updates OpForce Provisioning Software

In a step toward creating a more seamless utility computing model, Veritas today announced the latest version of OpForce, its distributed server provisioning software.

OpForce Enterprise Edition 4.0 allows a user to simultaneously discover, provision, configure, and track distributed servers and applications across heterogeneous environments. This allows customers to increase server utilization and improve server infrastructure flexibility, thereby lowering the overall cost and complexity of managing their IT operations.

According to Jeff Hausman, director for strategic marketing for Veritas, OpForce is well-suited for large-scale server or blade deployments, self-provisioning pre-production environments, compliance management and server configuration needs. "OpForce can significantly reduce time, cost and complexity in managing data center servers," Hausman said.

While the traditional strengths of OpForce had been on the build side, Hausman said the new release allows for IT managers to discover and inventory prepackaged and custom applications and report the differences between any number of provisioned servers. OpForce also builds on top of Microsoft Sysprep to create a universal and portable golden Windows server snapshot that can be matched with any server to be provisioned.

As part of its alliance with BEA announced in April, OpForce 4.0 provides tight integration with Web Logic and enables system administrators to deploy and provision BEA WebLogic Servers significantly faster.OpForce 4.0 will be available this month and supports AIX, Red Hat, SuSE Linux, Solaris and Windows operating systems.The company will support HP-UX in the future, said officials. Pricing starts at $7,500 per management server, and $500 per managed CPU.