By Jacqueline Emigh
Linux Today Writer
At the LinuxWorld show in Frankfurt, Germany today, Veritas
Software unveiled a deal with SuSE Linux that will give enterprise
customers a choice between two major Linux distributions for
large-scale data center applications.
The enterprise-level storage management, availability and backup
specialist inked a similar engineering, marketing, and technical
support pact with SuSE rival Red Hat almost two years ago.
Under the new agreement, Veritas will ultimately offer all four
of its software products pre-certified for SuSE Linux. Veritas’
software supports Oracle, IBM DB2, and MySQL databases.
“We’ll also be providing technical support in a more meaningful
way. SuSE customers will now be able to call either Veritas or SuSE
for support,” maintained Ranajit Nevatia, Veritas’ director of
Linux strategy.
“We’ve always had the intention of supporting both Red Hat and
SuSE, anyway,” the Linux strategist told Linux Today. Veritas,
however, is taking an incremental approach to implementing its
software on Linux.
The ISV’s first step, a couple of years back, was to make its
Net Backup software available on the Red Hat distro.
“We needed to prove to ourselves that we could run as well —
and as reliably–on Linux as on Unix,” Nevatia admitted. “We then
entered into a more formal relationship with Red Hat in Q1 of last
year.”
Similarly, Veritas had already started selling its Net Backup
client for the SuSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES) 8 platform even
before today’s announcement.
Meanwhile, other offerings from Veritas are now in beta among
SuSE customers in the finance, banking, technical, government, and
health care markets. Next month, Veritas plans to release a SuSE
edition of its OpForce remote software installation and management
product.
By the second week in January, 2004, the company will enter GA
with SuSE versions of its Foundation Suite and Cluster Server
software, Nevatia told Linux Today.
Initially, Veritas’ Linux-based software is running on x86-based
PC servers. Support for Itanium and IBM zSeries mainframe platforms
will follow, according to Nevatia.
Nevatia pointed to performance and adaptability as two of
Veritas’ main claims to fame. “With Veritas File System and Veritas
Volume Manager – the two components of our Foundation Suite–we can
make Linux servers run up to five times faster,” he contended.
Also, Nevatia said, administrators can use simple configuration
changes to enable features such as database snapshots across any of
the three supported database platforms.
By and large, analysts view the announcement as the latest in
the series of signs that market momentum for an enterprise-ready
Linux continues to grow.
“The Linux genie is out there now,” observed Jocelyn Noel,
principal analyst at JNoel & Associates. “Veritas is only
responding to its customers, who are saying, ‘We want to go ahead
and implement Linux.'”