Veritas Introduces NAS, Clustering Wares For Linux
Among the new Linux-oriented products Veritas introduced were Veritas Cluster Server, aimed at enterprise environments, and Veritas ServPoint NAS, which transforms industry-standard hardware components into nonproprietary NAS file servers.
Veritas CEO Gary Bloom said he sees Linux as an incremental opportunity for Veritas, rather than as a displacement of Sun Solaris. Some 45 percent of Veritas storage products are sold on the Solaris platform, Veritas executives have said.
Solution providers aren't surprised to see Veritas move toward Linux. But they also see no reason to rush in to the enterprise with Linux, despite support from Veritas and Sun.
Mark Romanowski, senior vice president of client services and business development at AMC, a New York-based solution provider, said it would be foolish of Veritas to not jump on the Linux bandwagon, although he seldom sees Linux in the enterprise. "Linux is still a niche," he said.
Dave Hiechel, president and CEO of Eagle Software, a Salina, Kan.-based solution provider, agreed that enterprises have been slow to adopt Linux. "Until we see terabytes of storage on Linux, I'm not going to focus on it," he said.
Sun took the Veritas-Linux alignment in stride.
"We continue to have a really close relationship with Veritas,we do a ton of work, joint engineering, testing and marketing with them," said Mark Bohlig, director of global ISVs at Sun. "Today was the day for them to shine the light on their Linux strategy, and that's cool, but Solaris is still by far the No. 1 deployment platform for Veritas."
BARBARA DARROW contributed to this story.