Like many software companies, VERITAS Software has
queued up a news announcement surrounding the Linux operating system in
time
for the LinuxWorld Expo in New York City this week.
VERITAS, a storage software outfit evolving into a utility computing
company, said it has expanded storage, clustering and server provisioning
support
for SUSE LINUX and VMware to give customers another alternative to
Microsoft
Windows, Unix and other platforms.
Like rivals IBM, HP
and EMC,
VERITAS is working to carve out territory in the on-demand
computing space, in which computing resources are piped to users on an as-needed basis. Ranajit Nevatia of VERITAS said his company believes the time is right to embrace Linux
more than it ever has because the number of customers seeking enterprise
storage and high availability features on Linux is growing.
This is because, according to IDC analyst Dan Kuznetsky, organizations
are
looking for ways to lower their technology acquisition costs through
open-source software such as Linux.
Because VERITAS is looking to provide all kinds of businesses with the
building blocks for utility computing, such as clustering, server
provisioning and virtualization, Nevatia said it was imperative to
include
Linux, which is, by many expert accounts, the fastest growing operating system.
Nevatia told internetnews.com that VERITAS Cluster
Server and
VERITAS Foundation Suite, which includes VERITAS File System and
VERITAS
Volume Manager, are now available on SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server.
So, too, is OpForce, the server provisioning software VERITAS picked up
from
its purchase of Jareva Technologies last year. OpForce is now on
version
3.2, which has new time saving features when migrating servers to Linux
for
server consolidation. With OpForce 3.2, customers can provision bare
metal
and blade servers running on SUSE and Red Hat.
Also, the VERITAS Cluster Server for Linux is now available for VMware
ESX
Server to offer customers the first high availability option for
VMware.
VMware allows multiple instances of Linux, Red Hat or SUSE LINUX,
Microsoft
Windows and Novell Netware to run on a single Intel server.
VERITAS Cluster Server for VMware, Nevatia said, can monitor each of
the
virtual machines within the VMware ESX Server and failover any of the
machines to another node in the cluster, or to an entire server in the
event
a server fails.
All of these VERITAS products were previously available for Red Hat’s
Linux
platform, but Nevatia said that Novell’s purchase of SUSE made the SUSE
server all the more attractive to his company because it means SUSE
will have staying power.