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 of 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 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 turned away from pricey enterprise platforms and looked towards the thriftier Linux OS instead.

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.

Story courtesy of Internet News.

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