Veritas Software continued its utility computing push Monday, extending capabilities from its acquisition of Precise Software Solutions to Microsoft’s SQL Server environments.
Since acquiring Precise earlier this year, Mountain View, Calif.’s Veritas has been steadily turning into a provider of utility computing, an increasingly popular type of provisioning services offered to customers in order to grant them more control over turning power on or off like a switch.
Benefits of this method could include a reduction in hardware and labor costs because storage and servers are pooled and resources are automatically provisioned. IBM , HP,
Sun Microsystems,
CA
and a few others join Veritas in defining this niche.
The latest version of the application performance management (APM) software it purchased from Precise, Veritas i3 for SQL Server allows an application manager to monitor a transaction in real-time from the end-user through the storage array so they may detect, diagnose and correct application performance problems on the fly.
This is crucial as some applications can cost an organization, particularly a finance-oriented business such as a bank, millions of dollars in lost business if it goes down.
To be sure, Application performance, which some analysts think may bloom to a $5 billion market by 2006, is an important characteristic of utility computing because applications are managed to predetermined levels of availability and performance.
Veritas has a predecessor in this type of managed applications offering for utility computing: IBM. Big Blue views application performance as highly important and has created a number of autonomic, or “self-healing” technologies that dictate how an on-demand environment is managed. The company recently issued a pledge to craft standards for autonomic computing to help manage the processes in a network.
But even as a major provider of storage-oriented software, Veritas
incorporated support for several Microsoft software products. Veritas Senior
Director of Product Marketing Bob Maness said SQL Server is becoming the
“platform of choice” for creating business applications, such as those
offered by PeopleSoft and SAP. The new Veritas i3 for SQL Server software
supports enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications from those
companies.
In fact, a host of Veritas products support SQL Server 2000 on Windows
Server 2003, including Backup Exec, which is backup and restore software
tailored for Windows; NetBackup, an enterprise data protection, archive, and
recovery product for heterogeneous environments; and Storage Replicator,
which provides organizations the ability to protect their remote office data
through real-time data replication that guards against business
interruption.
StorageCentral software and volume management technology for Windows will
support SQL 2000 on Windows Server 2003 later this quarter. Veritas’ Cluster
Server, Global Cluster Manager, SANPoint Control and Volume Replicator now
support SQL 2000 on Windows 2000, and will support Windows Server 2003 in
2004.
Veritas Supports Utility Computing Via SQL Server
