Veritas Extends Information AvailabilityVeritas Extends Information Availability

Veritas Software Corp. next week will unveil cluster-management products designed to help IT managers handle the mostly manual processes used to keep information flowing between the servers and storage devices in a cluster.

Volume Replicator will let customers replicate data between heterogeneous servers and storage for protection and recovery; competing products from storage vendors only work with each vendor's storage systems. Veritas also will unveil Traffic Director, software that can balance and redirect information coming in from the Internet. When a server goes down, the software is supposed to instantly send the information to another server so a Web site remains up all the time. Veritas' Global Console Manager can control both applications.

Veritas developed the software to help tie together back-end systems and Web sites. "From the user experience,the Web site and the infrastructure behind it all work as one unit," says Jonathan Martin, a product-management director. "Any outage appears to the user as the same thing: The site is unavailable."

Bill Augustadt, chief architect at eOnline Inc., an application service provider in Cupertino, Calif., plans to install the Veritas Replicator next month to support a disaster-recovery project for a customer who wants four hours or less of recovery time in case of an outage. It would take longer, perhaps days, if eOnline used conventional tape backup, Augustadt says. He says he looked at Symmetrix Remote Data Facility from EMC Corp., but decided against it because the software would have required him to use EMC's Symmetrix hardware and the overall cost would have put him over budget. "Without Veritas, we wouldn't meet the business requirement of our customers," he says.

Gartner analyst Donna Scott says the Veritas products provide a broad range of capabilities that should appeal to IT managers. "Veritas extends information availability, allowing IT executives to work with [fewer] vendors," she says. "They can have service-level agreements with less players around."