LinuxWorld: Storage Wares from VERITAS and Western Digital

VERITAS continues to spread its wings beyond its storage roots and has taken the wraps off of new software designed to bring the virtues of utility computing to enterprise Linux environments.

The firm’s latest line of software addresses the availability and reliability of large DB2, MySQL, and Oracle databases running on Linux systems. The results are streamlined database-driven applications and robust clustered database servers that automatically and transparently shift workload when things go awry in the datacenter.

Three software products, VERITAS Cluster Server agents, Indepth, and OpForce form the crux of the company’s new line of utility computing products.

The Cluster Server agents ensure application uptime by monitoring up to 32 nodes and initiating a failover and system restart when a fault is detected. The software is able to determine when faults occur by culling information on a database, disks, application, file system, volumes, and the network.

Indepth, on the other hand, tunes internal and customer-facing applications during the development, testing, and production cycles. Designed for J2EE applications and applications running on IBM DB2 UDB and Oracle databases, the software is designed to aid in the creation of fast performing and error-free applications typical of e-commerce environments and areas with heavy customer interaction.

Lastly, VERITAS announced version 3.0 of OpForce. Improvements in the upgrade include upgraded provisioning and automation features that further help IT departments get a handle on large-scale network deployments.

In a separate announcement, the company confirmed that IBM’s eServer zSeries mainframe system is shipping with Foundation Suite with support for Red Hat 7.2. The suite includes VERITAS File System and Volume Manager – utilities that ease server consolidation and reduce downtime.

Western Digital Pushes SATA

Hard drive manufacturer Western Digital is doing its part to accelerate the adoption of Serial ATA (SATA) from booth 172 at LinuxWorld.

Nestled among the host bus adapters, system storage cases, and applications running on the company’s latest SATA offerings, namely the 10,000 RPM Raptor and the 7,200 RPM Caviar, Western Digital is demonstrating direct-attached and network-attached storage systems with capacities from 144 GB to over 3 TB as well as Linux-based servers utilizing the standard.

SATA’s price/performance proposition mirrors, in some ways, the way companies have been billing Linux as a viable server OS. Western Digital representative, Richard Rutledge, points out that “a server based on WD Raptor hard drives offers performance and reliability once only associated with SCSI, but at a lower cost than the competitive SCSI comparison.”

Back to Enterprise Storage Forum