Veritas OpForce 4.0 Supports Hardware, OS Platform Mix

Version 4.0 allows a single Windows-based software image to be deployed across servers regardless of underlying hardware, instead of requiring a new image for each type of server, said Jeff Hausman, director of strategic marketing for storage and server management at Veritas.

Also new is the ability to remotely install an operating system and to use multiple network cards for failover purposes, Hausman said.

The new software also discovers applications and ensures that updates are made properly regardless of hardware or operating system including, for the first time, AIX. A server change management tool flags application differences between multiple servers.

Keith Trotte, account representative at SSI hubcity, Metuchen, N.J., said OpForce's support of multiple hardware and operating system platforms is important as customers deploy mixed environments.

SSI hubcity specializes in application development and deployment, and is starting to ramp up to take advantage of OpForce. This will include hiring application performance specialists, Trotte said.

"We want to help customers tune and optimize their applications," he said. "Go in, pin-point bottlenecks, look at the application layer. Now Veritas [OpForce] can do all that. It gives customers a single way to dig and view multiple parts of their data centers."

OpForce is part of Veritas' push to bring utility computing to the enterprise and the channel, which accounts for almost half of OpForce revenue, Hausman said. "Our whole concept is you can use bits and pieces as you move to utility computing," he said. "You don't buy utility computing."

OpForce works not only with multiplatform physical servers but with virtual servers created by software such as VMware's ESX Server, he said. "If you have VMware and OpForce, you use VMware to define partitions, and then OpForce can discover the partitions, treat them as individual servers and repurpose them."

The list price for the OpForce management server portion is about $7,500. Target servers are $500 per CPU. Multicore processors are considered a single processor.