Features - Storage Innovations:

VERITAS SOFTWARE UNVEILS SWEEPING STORAGE MGMT ENHANCEMENTS

VERITAS Software Corp, a leading storage software provider, announced the availability of VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0, storage management and virtualization software which allows organizations to gain control of storage complexity by improving utilization while simplifying the administration of heterogeneous environments. VERITAS Storage Foundation integrates VERITAS Volume Manager, the market-leading storage virtualization software, and VERITAS File System, an industry standard file system, to manage multiple operating systems across storage devices and databases, helping to ensure continuous availability of mission-critical data.

Integral to the company's strategy to enable utility computing, VERITAS Storage Foundation software (formerly VERITAS Foundation Suite) provides the basis for increasing the availability, manageability and performance of systems and storage, driving down costs through shared storage infrastructure.

"As our data volumes grow, we need to feel confident that we can effectively manage our storage environment through streamlined administration," said Stuart Hepworth, development manager of East Midlands Electricity based in the United Kingdom. "VERITAS Storage Foundation provides us with a data management solution to help ensure continuous availability of our mission-critical data, while delivering optimal performance and efficient manageability to support our new Field Force E-enablement application."

As the most significant release of VERITAS' core storage management technology since the company introduced virtualization and file system software in 1992, VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 delivers these key industry innovations:

• Increased Storage Utilization: With online file migration, unimportant or rarely accessed files can be transferred, through policy-based file distribution, from expensive storage arrays to inexpensive storage devices without any disruption to the IT user.
• Simplified Server Migration: With the portable data containers feature, Storage Foundation provides heterogeneous storage support by allowing data to be easily shared between servers with different operating systems.
• Reduced Downtime: As a key innovation in VERITAS Storage Foundation, dynamic multi-pathing spreads data across multiple network paths for improved performance and availability.
• Increased Administrator Productivity: Provisioning templates allow administrators to consistently and accurately provision new storage using standardized, user definable configuration templates, eliminating configuration errors.

Additionally, VERITAS Storage Foundation is tailored to meet the needs of wide-ranged storage environments. For organizations requiring enhanced database support, VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle, Sybase and DB2 delivers improved performance, availability and manageability of database ecosystems. For advanced clustering capabilities, VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC and VERITAS Storage Foundation Cluster File System include both cluster volume managers and cluster file systems for concurrent data access from multiple servers.

"We are continually working to provide our customers with the advanced technology to simplify the management and improve the performance of complex storage systems in our core storage management product areas," said Jose Iglesias, vice president of product management for VERITAS Software. "This milestone release of VERITAS Storage Foundation brings our customers one step closer to adopting a utility computing environment, maximizing utilization and reducing overall costs."