The company has also said that it has reorganized into three groups, splitting parts of the former Veritas portfolio across two divisions.
Before its merger with Symantec, Veritas Software Corp in 2004 described the integration of the software it gained when it bought start-up Ejasent with its server clustering software as one of the major steps in its utility computing plans. Now the company says it will launch that integrated product next month, at its user conference.
The integration has been a long time coming. Ejasent was bought in 2004, and Veritas originally promised to complete the integration in 2005. But all of Veritas’ grand plans to automate the management of utility-style server farms have been running slow for some while, because the company has admitted that they were too ambitious for the huge majority of customers.
Ejasent’s Solaris-based Upscale software has not yet supported Windows or Linux servers, which might be a significant defiiciency given the popularity of those platforms in server farms. Last year Veritas said that the first integration of UpScale into its clustering software would only support Solaris, but that later versions would cover other platforms, although it gave no timetable for that extended support. This month the company would not discuss platform support at all.
Overall, Symantec’s stance on its server and systems management is the same as it has been for about the last two years. The company continues to pitch the merits of its hardware-independence, and says that the route to utility computing begins with practices such as charge-back, and a services-oriented approach to IT.
The core concept around utility computing has not changed. The priorities are to solve immediate problems, and give customers the confidence that we can set them on a path towards a data center that will be more automated, and aligned with business needs, said Kris Hagerman, senior vice president of Symantec’s data center management group.
Hagerman’s group is responsible for almost all but not quite the entire former Veritas software portfolio. The only ex-Veritas software it does not cover is Veritas’ high-end Backup Exec software, and its KVS-originated archiving tools.
Those two products have been handed to an Enterprise Security and Data Management group, which is being headed by Veritas’ former marketing SVP Jeremy Burton, and also covers software such as Symantec’s LiveState Windows imaging tools, Brightmail anti-spam application, and IMLogic messaging manager.
The third group inside Symantec is a consumer group, responsible for all of Symantec’s Norton desktop consumer products. Each of the three groups pulls in around $1.5bn to $1.7bn revenue and employs around 2,000 to 2,500 people.
