Veritas Software overhauls storage software

Computerworld - Veritas Software Corp. today released Storage Foundation 4.0, the latest version of its storage management and virtualization software that allows companies to deploy utility computing across storage, servers and applications.
"We've bundled Volume Manager and File System into a storage foundation -- a suite of these two products. We wanted to increase storage utilization and increase administrative productivity," said Marty Ward, director of product marketing at Mountain View, Calif.-based Veritas. "This is the most significant release of this storage foundation product since the initial release in 1992."
Ward said the product can increase storage utilization through online file migration, automatically moving less-important data to lower-cost storage arrays without disrupting the user. With the portable data containers feature, data can be shared between servers with different operating systems, he said.
Provisioning templates allow administrators to quickly allocate new storage, configured to customer specifications, using standardized templates, Ward said.
Another feature, dynamic multipathing, spreads data across multiple network paths for improved performance and availability, he said. "We've added five new performance algorithms into the product ... this year, which enables us to handle any application environment you can ever dream of," Ward said.
Veritas has also added FlashSnap enhancements to its new product to create snapshots of volumes and file systems, allowing for critical data to be recovered quickly, he said.
"What they've got there with the storage foundation is the best-of-breed volume manager and file system, and they've added some more features to it around improving performance manageability and around improving utilization," said Michael Fisch, an analyst at The Clipper Group in Wellesley, Mass.
"We have a lot of databases -- including one of largest Oracle accounts receivable in the world -- and we're looking to take some of the archival data that's in this database and migrate it off to some other storage, but still leaving it online," said Aaron Huslage, senior systems administrator at CNF Service Co. in Palo Alto, Calif. "Storage foundation 4.0 let's us do that.
"We're looking to move our archived data from high-end enterprise storage like Hitachi arrays to lower-end Network Appliance NearStor systems," he said. "It will lower our storage costs about 20% or 30%."
Huslage said CNF is trying to retool itself for a utility type of computing environment.
"We struggle a lot with managing these large volumes, so we're trying to streamline our storage management so we have better control over where our resources are going," he said. "The new products from Veritas are helping us along with that. They've really respondedwell to what customers have wanted."