Features - Storage Innovations:

VERITAS EXTENDS CAPABILITIES OF SERVER PROVISIONING SOFTWARE

VERITAS Software Corp extended the capabilities of VERITAS OpForce distributed server provisioning software to include software application discovery and configuration. VERITAS OpForce Enterprise Edition 4.0 enables IT administrators to simultaneously discover, provision, configure and track distributed servers and applications throughout their lifecycle across multi-tiered heterogeneous data centers to help significantly reduce the time, cost and complexity traditionally associated with these tasks. Distributed server provisioning and application configuration management are key to VERITAS' strategy to enable utility computing, allowing customers to increase server utilization, improve server infrastructure flexibility and help lower the overall cost and complexity of managing their IT operations.

VERITAS OpForce Enterprise Edition 4.0 software allows administrators to automatically detect and manage dissimilar server configurations. In addition, through new point-in-time snapshot and reprovisioning capabilities, OpForce software helps ensure regulatory compliance of heterogeneous servers across the enterprise.

VERITAS OpForce software now enables system administrators to deploy and provision BEA WebLogic Servers in a matter of minutes, as opposed to hours, making it significantly faster and easier to provision resources in BEA WebLogic Server environments and greatly reducing the potential for configuration errors.

"Since expanding our relationship and alliance in April of this year, the BEA and VERITAS teams have been working diligently toward integration of our product sets to help customers to move toward a utility computing model where the provisioning of enterprise applications can be largely automated," said Benjamin Renaud, deputy CTO of BEA Systems. "We are pleased with VERITAS' advancements with OpForce software and look forward to providing our customers with the right provisioning tools designed to help simplify and automate the process of deploying, provisioning and managing WebLogic Server in their business operations."

According to a June 2004 META Group study, automation technology is key to improving the productivity of administrative staff, enabling companies to do more with the same level of resources. Server provisioning is further augmented with VERITAS OpForce 4.0 software by providing customers with new discovery and configuration management capabilities for their multi-tier datacenter environments. These two new capabilities help streamline server provisioning, prevent server configuration errors and further align IT with the changing needs of the business.

"Using VERITAS OpForce software, LogicaCMG has been able to succinctly deploy updates and software packages for our worldwide customer base, a task which previously took several hours and required our engineers to go on-site at each given location but can now be accomplished within minutes," said Roel Dekker, vice president of Business Unit Mobile Internet at LogicaCMG. "By year end, we expect to have hundreds of servers deployed with configuration management and maintained with OpForce 4.0 software, resulting in higher levels of operational excellence."

New features of VERITAS OpForce 4.0 include:

• Application Discovery: OpForce software discovers and inventories prepackaged and custom applications, making the IT administrator more aware and knowledgeable about applications running on each server.

• Application Provisioning and Configuration Management: Through the creation of application software packages and one or many associated configuration models, OpForce software enables administrators to greatly simplify deployment, configuration and ongoing management of distributed applications across heterogeneous servers.

• Change Management: OpForce software provides consistency and lessens the potential of server performance problems by quickly discovering, analyzing and reporting differences between any number of provisioned servers. This innovative feature makes it possible for administrators to detect and correct server configuration drifts and helps to ensure compliance.

• Remote Operating System Installation: In addition to image-based installations, OpForce software can now conduct a fresh, remote, unattended install of the following operating systems: Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 3.0 -- onto any managed server, making the datacenter more efficient, dynamic and reliable.

• Universal Portable Snapshots: OpForce software builds on top of Microsoft Sysprep technology to create a universal and portable golden Windows server snapshot that can be matched with any server to be provisioned. This unique capability further automates the provisioning of dissimilar servers and provides flexibility when faced with configuration and hardware changes that would otherwise force the recreation of images.

• Enhanced Integration: OpForce now extends support for VERITAS Storage Foundation software. Now administrators can automatically provision bare-metal Sun Solaris and IBM AIX servers with fully configured VERITAS Storage Foundation software in addition to operating systems, patches and applications, effectively tying together storage and server management.

• Enhanced Networking Support: OpForce software now includes enhanced support for network personalization on servers including network interface card (NIC) teaming, Infiniband host channel adaptor (HCA) support and simple network management protocol (SNMP) trap detection for event driven operations to further enable utility computing.

"Our customers currently rely on OpForce software to automate server provisioning to simplify their operations and enable improved server utilization," said Kris Hagerman, executive vice president of the Storage and Server Management Group at VERITAS Software. "Now with OpForce 4.0 software IT can take advantage of the new capabilities that include application discovery and provisioning to more efficiently manage the data center and reduce operational costs."