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Veritas makes Linux as strong as Solaris

Carly Fiorina's birthday port

LinuxWorld While best known as a Solaris bedfellow, Veritas Software continues to make strides deeper into the Linux camp, announcing today several new products for the open source operating system, a Unix to Linux porting tool and its membership in the OSDL (Open Source Development Lab).

Most notably, Veritas has now brought its Storage Foundation 4.0 product to Red Hat Linux. This software, released on Solaris way back in February, combines the Veritas File System and Volume Manager into a single product. This gives Linux customers access to high-end data management software and puts a little more pressure on Sun to keep Solaris customers from shifting to Linux. Veritas has also certified its Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC, Storage Foundation Cluster File System, Cluster Server with Global Cluster Option and Volume Replicator products to work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

These releases are part of Veritas' long-term, but slow going, strategy to get all of its software released on Solaris, Linux, HP-UX and AIX at the same time.

"Our intention for the longest time has been to try and release on all those platforms cosynchronously [sic]," said Ranajit Nevatia, director of Linux strategy at Veritas. "We've been putting in processes to get to that since last year, and we have been able to compress some of the release time down."

By next year, Veritas expects to have product releases for at least Solaris and Linux arriving at about the same time, Nevatia said.

In the meantime, Veritas is making it much easier for Unix customers to find their way over to Linux. It has brought the Portable Data Containers technology, previously only available to Solaris customers, to Storage Foundation 4.0 for Linux. This converts data for use on Linux and lets customers dump the data on a Linux system with relative ease.

"It makes the data independent of the server or OS architecture," Nevatia said.

Veritas has also upgraded its Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC product to run across numerous servers instead of just one. Veritas claims customers looking to run Oracle databases on clusters will pick its volume manager/file system combination over similar products from the likes of Red Hat's Sistina division and Polyserve.

And, as fancy infomercial broom sellers say late at night, "that's not all."

Customers can now pick up Veritas' Cluster Server product for Linux and make use of its wide-area failover technology. This software protects data on single systems and clusters on a wide range of platforms. Couple it with the Volume Replicator for Linux, which allows long distance data replication over IP, and you're in serious data protection country.

Veritas also said that Version 7.0 of its i3 application performance monitoring software, acquired in the Precise buy, will have all three of the i3 components running on Linux. So no more i1.

But what does all this cost and when can I get my bloody hands on it, Bob?

Well, the vast majority of these products arrive on Sept. 6 - better known as HP CEO Carly Fiorina's birthday. The i3 software will ship in the fourth quarter.

The pricing is as follows: Veritas Storage Foundation starts at $995, Storage Foundation Oracle RAC starts at $6,000, Storage Foundation Cluster File System starts at $2,500, Cluster Server with the Global Cluster Option starts at $1,500 and Volume Replicator starts at $2,500.

For those interested in the 64-bitness of Veritas software, you can expect a 64-bit version of the Storage Foundation 4.0 product in the first half of next year. This will run on both AMD's Opteron and Intel's new Xeon chips. Veritas already supports Itanium, which we're sure does little to boost anyone's revenue. ®

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