The storage specialist says that in the fourth quarter it will ship the first release of a product to be called Service Manager, which has just begun beta testing. At different times during the company’s user conference in Las Vegas this week Veritas described the forthcoming software as a product focused on backup and SRM, and as a policy-based front-end that will tie together the company’s existing SRM and automatic provisioning software to allow IT departments to offer self-service storage to end-users.
Veritas said end-users will be able to request storage capacity from a portal or web site, and that its software will provide sufficient information about its cost to allow IT departments to run charge-back schemes under which they can bill user departments for the resources they consume.
Veritas launched its first automatic provisioning software last Fall, around the same time as similar products emerged from EMC Corp, Hewlett Packard Co and other suppliers. Automated provisioning tools handle the hugely laborious and time-consuming tasks of allocating storage to applications, which involves configuring servers, SANs and disk arrays. HP’s Openview Storage Provisioner also features a self-service facility. One edge which Veritas’ software is very likely to have over the HP software is in the range of storage arrays on which it will be able to allocate storage.
This first release of Service Manager will not use any of the technology acquired with Veritas’ purchase of Jareva Technologies Inc which closed in the first quarter, or Precise Software Solutions Inc which is due to close this quarter. Those technologies will appear in subsequent versions of Service Manager, which will appear next year. First to appear at an unspecified date during 2004 will be a version of Service Manager that will provide utility computing-style management of pools of servers or server blades using Jareva’s technology. At the end of 2004, Veritas will ship a version of Service Manager that is designed to handle application software and will be more heavily reliant on Precise’s application monitoring and SRM technology.
Jareva’s server provisioning software automates the process of loading operating system and application software onto servers or blade servers, and configuring those devices. Such software will be key to the future world of utility computing being pitched by Veritas and other suppliers including IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc, which is based around the use of pooled IT resources. Server provisioning software will allow pools of servers to be rapidly re-allocated from one application to another in order meet changing application loads.
During the conference Veritas showed off a demonstration system put together using the former Jareva OpForce product – now branded as a Veritas product – together with Precise’s application monitoring and diagnosis software, and Veritas’ clustering software. During the demonstration a Linux server streaming a Godzilla video clip was running alongside a Windows server simply running a screen saver.
When an artificial error was introduced in order to hobble the video streaming server, the demo system detected the performance problem, and automatically swapped over the two servers. The server running Linux and acting as a video streamer became a Windows server running a screen server, and the Windows server running the screen saver became a Linux server streaming video. Total time to restore Godzilla to full frame-speed was around sixty seconds or so. Veritas said that this was a demonstration of a working although not shipping system.
The client back-up system launched by Veritas yesterday has been codenamed Project Shadow, and does not yet have a product name. It will ship at the end of the year as a lightweight client for laptops and PCs that will copy designated files to a centralized file server, from where the data can be backed up to tape. The software will then keep the copies synchronized, and as such Veritas extolled its virtues as a workgroup tool. The company said that unlike its existing client backup software, Project Shadow will not require the central server to run any backup application software.
Separately, Veritas took ComputerWire to task for reporting yesterday that the SAN Volume Manager virtualization software the company unveiled yesterday is likely to have limited scalability when its run-time engine is deployed across host servers, compared to the scalability it will have when it the run-time engine is deployed on a smart or intelligent switch. ComputerWire stands by that statement, but is happy to pass on Veritas’ claim that the run-time engine will only consume between 2% and 4% of host server CPU cycles.
Source: Computerwire
