Veritas Buys Ejasent for $59 Million

Targeting improved application virtualization capabilities, Veritas Software Corp. on Wednesday announced it had reached agreement to purchase Ejasent Inc. as part of a $59 million all-cash transaction. The sale is set to be completed by the end of the month.

Veritas said it plans to beef up its utility computing cache by adding Ejasent’s UpScale application virtualization technology into Veritas’ High Availability Clustering Group, while also integrating Ejasent’s MicroMeasure usage-based metering software into the storage titan’s CommandCentral Service product to enhance service-level reporting, said Troy Toman, senior director of product management for Mountain View, Calif.-based Veritas.

Since announcing its intentions over a year ago to pursue enablement of a utility computing model for customers, Veritas has proven to be quite aggressive in a bullish market. In that time the storage software maker has acquired Precise Software Solutions and Jareeva Technologies for a combined $599 million.

“Starting with Jareeva and Precise just over a year ago, and now with Ejasent, we feel this is building integrated components toward our broad software platform and gives us a comprehensive set of technologies of doing applications in an on-demand or utility environment,” Toman said. “The ability to manage lower levels of infrastructure, where we can repurpose and reprovision storage systems through a hardware independent layer…allows (users) to adapt and grow and migrate into a utility environment in a step-wise fashion.”

According to Toman, Veritas expects to deliver fully integrated UpScale and MicroMeasure software in the second quarter. Upscale initially will be available on Sun Solaris with a Linux version on tap for early 2005.

Ejasent’s UpScale technology can virtualize an application so it can be migrated in a non-disruptive fashion between servers and shared storage. The software takes a snapshot of an application and its state, preserving current data and settings for encumbered transference across different processing resources in a data center.

Additionally, Redwood City, Calif.-based Ejassent’s MicroMeasure product enables metering and billing of physical and logical resources and data, such as servers, storage and application transactions based upon specific users and departments. Micromeasure runs on Solaris, Windows, Linux and HP-UX.