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HP, VERITAS ACCELERATE HP-UX 11i VIRTUALIZATION

HP and VERITAS Software Corp announced an expansion of their long-standing alliance with the naming of VERITAS' products as HP's preferred file system and volume management solutions for HP-UX 11i environments.

Under a multi-year agreement between the two companies, HP plans to OEM select VERITAS Storage Foundation products in order to extend the industry-leading virtualization and high availability of HP-UX 11i and HP Serviceguard software and further ease customer evolution to standards-based HP Integrity and HP 9000 servers.

The companies plan to integrate key products, including VERITAS Storage Foundation Cluster File System and Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC, with HP Serviceguard. HP Serviceguard protects mission-critical applications from a wide variety of hardware and software failures. VERITAS Storage Foundation software provides simultaneous access to storage from multiple servers, enabling load sharing between servers and optimized use of shared storage devices.

"HP's strategic alignment with VERITAS for clustering file services is a welcome change in HP's roadmap, since there is no need to re-invent the wheel," said Gene Batan, senior vice president and head of Systems and Information Technology for Commerzbank USA. "VERITAS has a proven track record in developing highly available software solutions and we believe that this partnership serves HP customers well."

The integrated solutions will be key elements of the HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) for HP-UX 11i. Tight integration of virtualization with high availability enables HP VSE customers to automatically expand and contract server resources in real time based on business priorities and maintain service levels in the event of unexpected downtime.

"Our collaboration with VERITAS helps us to deliver on our Adaptive Enterprise strategy and assists our UNIX customers in their evolution to next-generation platforms," said Rich Marcello, senior vice president and general manager of Business Critical Servers at HP. "The thousands of customers running HP Serviceguard on HP-UX 11i today will gain access to VERITAS software -- directly from HP -- and close integration, a simplified purchasing process and cooperative support."

Building on its expanded relationship with VERITAS, HP plans to enhance the HP VSE with a single virtual view that provides common management and optimization of virtualized server and storage resources -- within a single server and across clusters, including clusters based on HP Serviceguard integrated with VERITAS Cluster File System. HP will also simplify the management of virtualized environments with tools that visualize the relationship between workloads and virtualized resources.

HP plans to offer the integrated solutions as software bundles on HP-UX 11i v2 in the third calendar quarter of 2005. The new bundles replace HP's previous plans to bring TruCluster technology and Advanced File System to HP-UX 11i v3. The companies anticipate that this will accelerate by about one year the delivery of similar capabilities to HP-UX 11i customers and those transitioning from Tru64 UNIX.

"HP's decision to make VERITAS the preferred file system and volume management offering for highly available HP-UX 11i environments opens up exciting new capabilities for our joint customers, and is a strong validation of VERITAS' ability to deliver industry-leading infrastructure solutions that support customers' heterogeneous environments, including HP-UX 11i and other leading platforms," said Kris Hagerman, executive vice president of Storage and Server Management Group at VERITAS. "VERITAS is committed to working closely with HP to deliver products and services to help customers quickly and easily deploy the solution to enhance their mission-critical, highly available application environments, including Oracle RAC."

In related news, HP is expanding its successful Alpha RetainTrust program for Tru64 UNIX customers. The program will now provide technical assistance and best practices to help implement the HP Serviceguard with VERITAS bundles as part of customers' transition to HP-UX 11i v2 on HP Integrity and HP 9000 servers. HP continues its HP 9000 Evolution Program, including workshops, tools, best practices and other incentives, to provide a smooth transition to standards-based HP Integrity servers.