Data recovery redefined in era of IDCs
At a conference today, Prashant Dholakia, senior VP of Availability products, said that, “The term High Availability is totally redefined in which a complete solution has the capacity to operate and scale seamlessly in all layers of the operating platform.”
Citing the example of an Internet Data Center, Jason Choong, sales manager Asia South, VERITAS Software stressed the importance of high availability for that industry, where customers expect 24 x 7 access. "Disaster recovery is now more than simply replicating data,” Choong added, “it has moved beyond replicating data in a single geography or location. Today’s companies demand secure access to their data from any location whatever the event.”
To ensure this high availability, VERITAS would in the next six to 18 months introduce a host of new storage management suites that works in line with their partners to ensure that they would be interoperable over different platforms and operate heterogeneously. According to Dholakia, by the end of 2002, VERITAS solutions would be able to operate under the Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, IBM-AIX and Linux environments.
Some areas that VERITAS would be looking into would be the Internet Data Center and IP storage markets. Dholkia said that VERITAS felt that the current market was too fragmented and is ready for consolidation. The opportunity for innovation is here and would be gained by a company who could make the first inroads into this market.
VERITAS planned to encourage ISVs to write solutions and applications to VERITAS's APIs. This would help to strengthen ties with partners across the board and hopefully give VERITAS a strong position in the market with products that are both interoperable and heterogeneous.
When asked about the evolution of storage from direct attached to Network Attached Storage to Storage Area Networks and beyond, Dholakia said that he saw the co-existence of SAN and storage over IP continuing into the foreseeable future. But he added “at some point would come a time when either SAN had to become smarter, or more intelligent, or lose out.”
How about the possibility of Veritas moving towards an ASP model? Dholakia could not see VERITAS doing that, although he said that they would surely support any ASP or other company who wished to move into the field.