Features - Storage Innovations:

VERITAS PLANS TO RESOLVE STORAGE COMPLEXITY MESS

As reported by Scott Tyler Shafer; Attempting to stay ahead of the innovation curve, Veritas is in the early stages of developing a generation of storage management software designed to overcome the complexities of using heterogeneous systems.

At a time when storage hardware vendors are moving into its space, the Mountain View CA-based storage software company believes the increasing complexity of storage administration points to a future convergence of Web services, grid computing, and storage technologies. "Fundamentally we're going to have to invent switching or the equivalent to encapsulate and to conquer this complexity," said Veritas CTO Paul Borrill.

Although Veritas is yet to go public with products that meet the CTO's aspirations, Borrill believes the solution to the storage industry's lack of interoperability lies in software that spreads business processes across distributed networks. "What you have to do is take lots and lots of very simple processes, lots of very simple rules, and put them in individual systems, treat them as a peer-to-peer system, and then create a solution which has an emergent behavior for what you're actually looking for," Borrill said.

Much of Veritas' time has been spent developing its SRM (storage resource management) software, which extends the concept of managing storage devices to focus on meeting the requirements of an enterprise application. EMC has entered the game with its WideSky initiative, as has Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) with its TrueNorth architecture. EMC's and HDS' respective initiatives contain a layer of software capable of managing storage systems regardless of vendor.

Fujitsu Softek, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu, is also targeting this opportunity. Scott Kennedy, vice president of business development, said the Sunnyvale CA-based company's Softek Storage Manager product currently gives enterprises a window into file-level data, independent of the storage platform. Veritas will continue to place emphasis on its SRM technology, according to Marty Ward, a product marketer at Veritas, referring to the company's Adaptive Software Architecture, which it introduced in May.

Bill Lewis, an analyst at New York-based investment bank JPMorgan Chase, said "SRM is a good idea, but it will not appear for some time due to the difficulties of developing the software. The hardware vendors have an advantage because (SRM) software is found on the storage (system)," Lewis said. But few are going to trust EMC to manage an IBM storage system.