Sun Microsystems is betting its enterprise storage strategy on badging technology from Veritas Software Inc, yesterday rolling out four of the Mountain View, California-based systems management specialists’ products for immediate delivery and bundling the backup utility with its top end Starfire Servers. Sun expects its Photon storage management strategy will play an increasingly important role in its business and it has set a goal to produce network attached storage products within the next couple of years. Sun has always used the Veritas backup and hierarchical storage management products but has now tightened the relationship, taking on Veritas’ volume manager, library monitor and the file system it’s famed for, working out a service between them to migrate Sun’s customers to the volume manager. Sun has recently added a storage management software group to work within the storage business unit. But embracing Veritas isn’t making Sun’s systems management strategy 100% clear, as Sun last week agreed to buy the Encore Computer Corp storage management business for $185m last week (CI No 3,170) and has yet to clarify what it intends to do with the product line. The new Veritas-based products are Sun Enterprise NetBackup – an archive and backup product, Sun Enterprise HSM, which is designed to improve data management. That’s the plumbing. The faucets, a Java-based common management ‘dashboard,’ is still being worked on and will overlay the Veritas and other storage management technologies.
SUN BETS ENTERPRISE STORAGE STRATEGY ON VERITAS PRODUCTS
