SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had

Comment The fate of hundreds of Veritas developers hung in the balance this week as parent Symantec was rumoured to have killed off its S4 object storage development effort.

Last week ESG's Steve Duplessie blogged that up to 600 Veritas developers and engineers of Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM), file system (VxFS) and Cluster Server (VCS) had been laid off, based on scores of emails he received from those with pink slips.

Another authoritative storage blogger, Robin Harris, wrote: "A reader writes that Symantec is laying off about 60 people from the division formerly known as Veritas."

Harris quoted his correspondent: "By now I’m sure you’ve heard about Symantec downsizing the (mostly) Mountain View storage group, cancelling some projects and moving others to India. One of the fallouts was a soon-to-be-rolled out object-based file system [S4], along the lines of a software version of Panasas. There is a lot of technical detail behind the project but ‘software Panasas for the commodity servers of your choice’ is the 35,000ft view.

"Symantec is right to retreat from storage."

Symantec promptly issued a statement denying this:

The bottom line is -- Symantec is not exiting this [Storage and Availability Management or SAMG] space, and we remain committed to helping our customers who face significant challenges in managing storage growth and ensuring the availability of their critical information. ... Symantec is 100 per cent committed to our SAMG product portfolio. None of the SAMG products that we offer today are being discontinued.

Symantec's statement said: "We are continuing to invest significant engineering resources in our core Storage Foundation and High Availability (SFHA) and Storage Management solutions. Some of the core areas where we are increasing investment are around Cluster File System, Dynamic Multi-Pathing, and value-added integration with VMWare environments." It also mentions FileStore - which uses SFHA - and Data Insight as specifically continuing.

There had been speculation that the FileStore filer acceleration product was being canned. It is not. Indeed Fujitsu has recently signed a deal with Symantec to offer it on its Eternus storage arrays.

However, the point above about the S4 object storage development being discontinued is not denied by Symantec, and it does seem that the S4 effort has been killed off. Neither did Symantec deny that a significant number of developers and engineers have been laid off.

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