Veritas is celebrating the strategic licensing, development and marketing pact it signed with Microsoft Corp last week. The deal will see the Veritas Volume Manager disk and storage management software running on NT 4.0 next year, and versions of its software fully integrated in with NT 5.0 in the future. Veritas has been working on a port of its Volume Manager, for years a mainstay of high-end Unix servers, since last year – it’s very complex software, says the company – and at the end of 1995 it was granted a source license for NT from Microsoft. The FTdisk utility currently within NT, integrated in with its Disk Administrator, is very rudimentary, according to Veritas, and Disk Administrator is itself limited to five or six disks at the most. Microsoft wants the facility to manage 20-30 disks that the Veritas software will give it, so that it can push into the data warehousing market with SQL Server. A beta – sans user interface – has already been shipped to one customer, but the official beta should emerge in the first quarter of next year, with first customer shipments some time after that. The deal also stretches to other Veritas products such as its Visual Administrator tools, RAID configuration for hardware and software, and performance tuning. Veritas says that, other than Insignia Solutions Inc, it is the only company to have been granted leave to incorporate its products within the NT kernel, and Microsoft itself is making changes to NT to support large disk configurations on NT 5.0. The versions bundled in with NT 5.0 are likely to b e a subset of the full Veritas product.
