Veritas Ports Ports Management Software To SUSEVeritas Ports Ports Management Software To SUSE

Veritas Software is porting many of its products to the SUSE Linux distribution, helping SUSE to offer the same kind of storage management features already available via Red Hat.

Starting this month, Veritas' File System and Volume Manager storage management applications will become available for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8, said Ranajit Nevatia, director of Linux strategy at Veritas.

File System is a journaling file system for scalability and performance of mission-critical applications, which provides fast recovery of data in case of a system crash, while Volume Manager is an online storage management tool for heterogeneous networks. Both have been available for Red Hat for some time, Nevatia said.

Veritas's Foundation Suite for Linux, which includes both File System and Volume Manager, is priced at $1,500 for a server with a single CPU and scales in price to $12,000 for an eight-processor server. When purchased with Veritas Cluster Services, the discount price ranges from $2,975 to $27,200.

Veritas also is expanding Linux support for its Cluster Server from Red Hat to SUSE, Nevatia said. Cluster Server is also now supporting server virtualization software from VMware, which was acquired this month by EMC. Cluster Server detects application, server or database faults and automatically fails the server over to another server, whether it be a virtual server or a physical server.

Pricing for Veritas Cluster Server for Linux for Red Hat and SUSE distributions and in VMware applications ranges from $1,995 for a one-way server to $19,995 for an eight-way server.

EMC's acquisition of VMware has so far not changed the latter's relationship with Veritas, Nevatia said. "We work with EMC as a partner, and we compete with them," he said. "The functionality we bring to VMware is not changing."

Also new to SUSE Linux is Veritas' OpForce i3 application, which automatically provisions servers on-the-fly. For Intel-based environments, the price is $7,500 for the application for a dedicated OpForce server and $500 per CPU for servers managed under OpForce. Non-Intel platform prices are higher.

Veritas is also porting its Bare Metal Restore application to Red Hat Linux this month for the first time and plans to port it to SUSE in the future, Nevatia said. Bare Metal Restore is aimed at restoring a crashed server without manually reinstalling operating systems or configuring hardware.