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Utility computing begins with storage

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CIOL Bureau
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Prasanto K Roy

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LAS VEGAS: If you thought Veritas offered only storage solutions, think

again. It now calls itself, "The leading provider of heterogeneous software

to enable utility computing." And according to the company this utility

computing is different from the systems vendors’ version.

This was highlighted at the company’s annual Vision seminar in Las Vegas

and Jeremy Burton, Veritas CMO and Senior VP, emphasized, "Storage is a

great place to start, to make the move to utility computing."

A year ago, Veritas was the storage software leader. This year, it has

dropped to second place, with 22 percent of the global storage software market

($1.78 billion: IDC) in Oct-Dec 2003. The newly merged EMC-Legato combine is at

the top with 32 percent before Veritas and is followed by CA at 10 percent and

IBM and HP in that order

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The IT Dept is the Utility

Does

the "utility computing" mean an external supplier offering

services to the enterprise?







Not quite, in Veritas’ vision.

The storage software company says that the final goal is: that the
enterprise IT department offers IT resources as a service, to the business

units of the enterprise. A measurable, rapidly scalable, even billable

service, with an SLA (service level agreement). That is the

utility.

Storage is the closest thing to utility computing that exists in IT

shops, according to CEO Gary Bloom. It’s centrally purchased, centrally

managed. Backup is a central process. So the fundamentals for utility

computing may already be there. But Veritas’ play goes beyond storage

Bloom's 5 steps to utility computing:






1. Discover what you actually have (how much storage, other IT resources,
how many people managing it, etc)



2. Consolidate it.


3. Standardize on best of breed.


4. Automate (with policy-based dynamic sharing, and pooling of assets)


5. The Service (start offering your IT resources as a service to business
users. Use consumption based metering, etc).






Veritas is not diverging or leaving behind storage. Asserts CEO Gary Bloom to

CyberMedia News, "It’s a great business to be in and we’re absolutely

committed to storage…it’s a key part of our business. We’ve been on an

expanding path in going beyond storage for a number of years now, from

clustering to provisioning and more…it’s an expansion strategy.

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In all fairness, Veritas outlined its "utility" vision and strategy

a year ago, at last year’s seminar. This year, the tag line says:

"Utility. Now". "We’re delivering on that vision," Bloom

said. "We’ve had a year of execution."

That "delivery" included today’s product announcements, two

additions to Veritas’ CommandCentral family- the 4.0 versions of its Storage,

Availability and Service products. CommandCentral Service, for instance, is a

software portal that "provides transparency into IT resource consumption,

service levels and costs".

Veritas has brought in new version to most of its products within the past

year. The complete family of CommandCentral software products sell for US

$64,000 upward, individual products are at $20,000 upward.

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Support for heterogeneity was a key part of Veritas’ strategy. In a

commissioned survey, 98 percent of CIOs said heterogeneous environment support

was essential. It reflected the reality of their IT assets, and also gave them

the freedom to shop around and more bargaining power.

Bloom also said that a number of partners have been getting

"increasingly closer" to Veritas and its view of utility computing

over the year, Bloom said. Among them are Network Appliance and Sun

Microsystems. CTOs and senior managers from these companies are scheduled to

speak at the event on their vision of utility computing.

Some of these "partners" are also competitors. Veritas competes and

cooperates with them. Said Bloom, "We’ll compete and they’ll win when a

customer says, I want an HP environment and only HP utilities. We’ll win when

the customer says, I want a heterogeneous environment."

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