Veritas buys Ejacent

Veritas Software is to acquire Ejasent Inc., a small private VC-funded company based in Mountain View California, for $59 Million, writes Tony Lock of Bloor Research.

Ejasent is described as a "technology purchase" as the company has only 21 staff and a small customer base. However, it owns some significant intellectual property in application virtualisation which Veritas is keen to develop for its rapidly expanding push into Utility computing.

Over the last twelve months Veritas has made great strides in the development of its Utility computing delivery capabilities. In November the company announced that its CommandCentral Service, essentially a high level command and control system for storage management, coupled with a range of new professional services, was to provide the platform for utility computing to enter the realm of storage management.

The new technologies and IP picked up in the Ejasent buy fit well into Veritas’s utility strategy. The core products are Ejasent Upscale and Ejasent MicroMeasure.

Upscale is a policy-based application management system that utilises Ejasent's patent-pending snapshot/ restore technology to virtualise applications across pools of server and infrastructure resources. The system can then dynamically provision and de-provision applications across different servers without any interruption to user availability. This is application virtualisation with complete state preservation making the dynamic migration of running applications possible between server and storage resources, based on the requirements of the business. Currently the product only supports the Sun Solaris environment with support for Linux under development.

There are clear linkages between these capabilities and those provided by existing VERITAS tools such as its Cluster Server technology and the Precise service monitoring and management products. As Upscale extends its platform support, the potential for its usage will grow enormously as in theory the tool has the capability to support any application running on a supported server.

The MicroMeasure product provides wide-ranging resource usage and metering capabilities. Characteristics such as CPU usage, storage consumption and bandwidth utilisation can be broken down at the application level. MicroMeasure then adds sophisticated reporting and analysis to making it straightforward to operate cost allocation and charge back schemes based on actual IT resource usage at the application level. Once again there are visible links to extend existing Veritas offerings in the OpForce and CommandCentral Service range.

Veritas expects the acquisition to close in the first quarter of the year and when it does all will be set for Ejasent and most of its staff to be brought into Veritas, a physical move that should pose few problems given the fact that the Ejasent offices are very close to some key Veritas buildings. There are no plans to run the outfit as a separate unit but instead the plan is to incorporate the core technologies into Veritas offerings over the next year or two. In the short-term standalone products will be sold and supported by Veritas. This move alone should increase the customer base for these technologies by several orders of magnitude given the lack of any presence of Ejasent outside the US.

If the technology works as described and VERITAS can quickly expand the supported operating system platform base, there is every reason to suppose that organisations will want to take advantage of Ejasent's ability to encapsulate an application with all of its state information, virtualise it and manage the utilisation of resources more effectively.

This could be a very shrewd buy; after all while there is some benefit in virtualising servers, networks and storage the big bang comes from keeping applications online, come what may.

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