IBM, Veritas Gird Users for Upgrades

IBM and Veritas Software Corp. are updating their storage management software lines with enhanced virtualization and replication technologies that officials at each company said will help enterprises readdress their storage infrastructures. Specifically, the products on tap will help users streamline system consolidation, add capacity and address compliance and business continuity issues.

IBM will extend its TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller, which allows users to move data among IBM and non-IBM storage devices, to support the entire breadth of EMC Corp.'s disk arrays, including its popular Symmetrix DMX box, by the first half of next year, said Jeff Barnett, manager of strategy for storage software at IBM.

IBM says its SAN Volume Controller will support rivals' wares. Click here to read more.

Forthcoming enhancements to SVC will bridge islands of SANs (storage area networks) to assist customers with migrations in remote locations, he said, by building on the software's synchronous and asynchronous replication capabilities.

While declining to elaborate, Barnett said, "This virtualized storage environment makes those [application] migrations much less painful because of the isolation of the servers and the storage from change. It's a good trigger for customers to say, 'When I do this, should I rethink my infrastructure and move it up a notch so it's more flexible?'"

Read more here about IBM's path toward storage virtualization.

For its part, Veritas by early next year will integrate the Upscale virtualization technology from its acquisition of Ejascent Inc. this year with the Veritas Cluster Server. This will let Cluster Server users move data from one application to another without disrupting the transaction state, according to company officials in Mountain View, Calif.

In addition, Veritas is working to more tightly couple Cluster Server with its i3 application management software and CommandCentral automated storage management software. The troika of united Veritas products will enable customers upgrading an application to monitor, track and collect information on the application's performance—as well as report on data across servers, operating systems, databases and devices—in a centralized format. This will ease administration of application migration, officials said.

With several widely deployed applications nearing end of life, an unusually large number of enterprisewide migrations are expected in the next year. Microsoft Corp., for instance, will halt extended support for its Exchange 5.5 messaging software at the end of next year and will end free support Dec. 31.

In addition, Oracle Corp. stopped supporting Version 10.7 of its Financials application suite last month, and the company will end error correction support for its Oracle 8i database Jan. 1.

"A lot of these vendors seem to be forcing these upgrades down people's throats, and that's where a lot of [migration headaches are] coming from," said Aaron Huslage, senior system administrator at CNF Service Co. and a Veritas customer. "We'll probably migrate the storage in place so it's easier and quicker to get done. Storage is really the center of our world at the moment."

Huslage credits virtualization technology from Veritas, particularly in the form of Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server products, for helping to avoid performance bottlenecks and reliability and scalability problems anticipated in his company's upgrade to Oracle 11i application suite.

Huslage said he is looking forward to getting virtualization capabilities entwined across Veritas applications.

"Having things monitored, and having actions taken on what things are doing [all together], is going to be crucial," said Huslage in Palo Alto, Calif.

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