IBM opens x86 Veritas cluster and storage shop

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By Ashlee Vance in Chicago • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 20th June 2005 15:51 GMT

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Veritas and IBM have firmed up their ties with a new reselling agreement that will see Big Blue ship some of Veritas' better known software products with its servers.

In particular, IBM will resell the Veritas Cluster Server product and the Storage Foundation product - which includes Veritas' file system and volume manager. These software packages will be promoted alongside IBM's Xeon-based servers and its fleet of Xeon- and Opteron-based blades. IBM hopes to target customers running Red Hat or SuSE Linux and Microsoft's Windows operating systems with the reselling deal.

"We believe the Veritas products will add value to what already is one of the most robust, reliable and available x86 server lines on the market, and also help make it easier for our mutual customers in their server consolidation efforts to Linux and Windows on xSeries and BladeCenter servers," said Jim Northington, a VP at IBM.

Veritas and IBM have partnered in the server arena for some time. While most of its business still revolves around Sun's Solaris OS, Veritas has been trying to promote other server vendors' versions of Unix and Linux where possible. Along those lines, it has bulked up support for IBM's AIX OS in recent years.

Now, however, the vendors have teamed to attack the x86 server market. IBM will resell all the major versions of the Veritas products, including Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC and Storage Foundation for Databases, including DB2.

IBM helps a number of ISVs land business and has been a particular fan of VMware in the x86 realm. Both VMware and Veritas give standard x86 systems more Unix-like features, turning the commodity gear into higher-end hardware. ®