Veritas Tries To Keep The Big Boys On Their ToesVeritas Tries To Keep The Big Boys On Their Toes

The company is unveiling SANPoint Control 3.5, which adds policy-based administration.

The way some big vendors are acting, one might suspect that the management of storage resources is something new. Through acquisitions this summer, both EMC Corp. and IBM made clear their intentions to join the storage-resource management arena. Veritas Software Corp., a stalwart in the market, is greeting the newcomers with a significant new version of its SANPoint Control software.

Storage-resource management has been around for a couple of decades and was the prize that Computer Associates coveted when it bought Sterling Software in 2000. The software is designed to help companies make efficient use of storage by never overloading any system. More importantly, storage-resource management can help cut down on the number of boxes operating at 20% or 30% of capacity.

So as the big storage vendors prepare to enter the market, CA, InterSAN, and Veritas are being sized up anew. InterSAN generally is thought to have better functionality, and CA has the widest breadth of capabilities. But Veritas is seen as the vendor with the right mix of both.

Veritas, in fact, is unveiling SANPoint Control 3.5, which adds policy-based administration that lets administrators establish rules and thresholds to avoid running machines running at 20% capacity. The software will also provide a console for administrators through which they can view other Veritas products that protect data, keep data available through system outages, and manage backups and recovery. SANPoint Control 3.5 starts at $20,000.

Industry analyst Anne Skamarock at Enterprise Management Associates likes the new SANPoint because it's one of the first modules that will snap into Veritas' Adaptive Software Architecture, a product strategy that buyers can use to plan their investments. She thinks EMC and IBM will "have a leg up" in the market, but she says true storage-resource management includes activities such as configuration, security control, and asset management. "None of the vendors have them all," Skamarock says, "but Veritas is one of the closest."