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VERITAS Software continued its utility computing push this week, extending capabilities from its acquisition of Precise Software Solutions to Microsoft’s SQL Server environments.
Since acquiring Precise earlier this year, Mountain View, Calif.-based 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 by pooling storage and servers, and by automatically provisioning resources. IBM , HP
, Sun Microsystems
, CA
, and a few others compete with VERITAS in this emerging niche.
The latest version of the application performance management (APM) software VERITAS 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 believes 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 offers 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.
Story courtesy of Internet News.
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