VERITAS Expands Linux Involvement

More than a year after announcing plans to puts its storage software on the Linux platform, VERITAS
signed a partnership with the second commercial
Linux OS Monday.

SuSE Linux will work with the enterprise storage software company to
engineer and sell VERITAS products going forward; for the time being it
will resell VERITAS’ File System, Volume Manager and Cluster Server
products, starting in the first part of 2004. Currently, the two
companies are in the beta stage in testing.

The Linux vendor is two years behind competitor Red Hat Linux , which signed a similar deal back in November, 2001.

Today’s news also gets the support from an unlikely source: IBM . Big Blue has a vested interest in the storage area network,
recently
releasing its TotalStorage SAN File System. The technology, dubbed
StorageTank by the company, has come under fire from many in the
industry as merely a product to edge
out companies like VERITAS in the market.

Some say the move to support VERITAS’ adoption of SuSE Linux is part of
IBM’s larger strategy to get as many vendors involved with Linux to
combat the $3
billion SCO lawsuit against IBM.

Since 1989, VERITAS has been a big name in the enterprise storage
business, providing data protection, storage management and data
recovery solutions. Only in recent times, however, has the company
pledged its support to the Linux community. This had more to
do with the collapse of the dot com bubble than anything else, as IT
managers looked away from pricey enterprise platforms and towards the
thriftier Linux OS.

Since then, VERITAS has embraced the Penguin and made significant
inroads in Linux adoption, mainly with top enterprise vendor Red Hat.
The company has kept with the GNU license and released kernel
enhancements that tie its proprietary software with the Linux platform.