Linux-certified versions of Veritas’ software tools due to ship next month will help drive the operating system in from the infrastructure edge towards application usage, Veritas claimed yesterday.
The release of the software will also at last give meaning to Veritas’ Portable Data Container facility. Currently PDC is a tool designed to help migrate applications from one server operating system to another, but which only supports one OS – Sun Microsystems’s Solaris. Overnight it will become principally a Linux migration tool.
As the second largest vendor of storage and data management software in the market, Veritas first shipped Linux-based products around five years ago, and shipped Linux-based volume management and clustering tools in 2001 and 2002 respectively.
Then, the workloads for Linux were different, and involved the edge tier of proxy, web, DNS and J2EE web servers. That was about disposable data, not valuable data that needs protecting, said Ranajit Nevata, director of Linux strategy at Veritas.
Next month Veritas will ship Red Hat Linux-certified versions of its Storage Foundation 4.0 software including the clustered versions of its volume manager and file system products, its version of Storage Foundation tailored for Oracle RAC, and its Volume Replicator IP-based replication tool.
Oracle RAC hasn’t yet taken off on Linux, but our Storage Foundation underpinning it will make it unbreakable, said Nevata, referring to the versions of Veritas’ clustered volume management and file system tailored for use with the Oracle database.
The Portable Data Container facility only works when the data originates in the Veritas File System and is to be stored on a platform running the same file system. That is not a major limit to its use helping migrate applications from Solaris to Linux, because a huge majority of high-end Solaris servers already use the Veritas File System.
If you look at where people are migrating from, a lot of it is from Solaris. We’re pretty well entrenched there, and we’ve got about 80% or 90% penetration in high-end Solaris, Nevata said.
Sun must already regret allowing Veritas to colonize its customer base with its file system. Now that the same file system is underpinning a Veritas tool that helps customers move off Solaris and onto Linux, the feeling can only be sharper.
But Trojan Horse comparisons are not valid according to Nevata. Our file system helped Solaris get into the data center, he said. And we’re not pitching at customers to move off Solaris onto Linux, we’re just telling them that they can trust their data to us and that we’ll serve them equally well regardless of what platform they use.
Next month’s software release will also see Veritas replacing a licensing scheme based on server tiers with a scheme based on processor-count, so better suiting scale-out architectures based on multiple server blades. According to Veritas, it will cut customer’s licensing costs by 30%.
