Veritas Beefs Up Disaster-Recovery Offerings With New Acquisition

Veritas Software The Kernel Group

Kernel, a 10-year-old Austin, Texas-based company with 49 employees, is the developer of Bare Metal Restore, an application designed to fully automate the recovery of Windows and multiple Unix systems in the event of data corruption or hardware failure.

Veritas' interest in Kernel comes from the fact that it is the only company focusing on high-speed system recovery from disasters and does so across multiple platforms including Windows NT and 2000, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX and HP-UX platforms, said Julie Stewart, director of product management at Veritas NetBackup. "This is a real enterprise application," she said.

Stewart said many companies offer automated backup-and-recovery applications. However, she said, if a file or any related data gets lost, a company needing to recover from a disaster could lose a lot of money during the recovery process.

Bare Metal Restore, on the other hand, automatically keeps track of all information related to the file system, such as network information, user preferences, drivers, settings and so on when doing backups in order to have that information available for speedy, reliable restores, said Stewart. As a result, the recovery time for a typical Solaris system with 600 Gbytes of data takes only about 20 minutes, she said.

Veritas plans to repackage Bare Metal Restore as an option for its NetBackup storage management software offering by the end of this quarter, Stewart said.

Prior to its acquisition by Veritas, Kernel had technology alliances with both Veritas and IBM. The IBM relationship, which focuses on IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager software, will continue per Kernel's current contract, despite the fact that Tivoli Storage Manager is one of the biggest competitors with Veritas' NetBackup application, Stewart said.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In related news, executives at GiantLoop Network, a Waltham, Mass.-based provider of services and software for information management and movement of critical corporate data, on Monday said the company will incorporate Veritas Volume Replicator and Veritas Cluster Server, two disaster-recovery applications, in its offerings.