Network Appliance (NetApp) and Veritas Software are
expanding a six-year-old strategic relationship to include
additional joint sales and marketing, product integration and
co-operative technical support.
The companies will offer a number of services for advanced data
protection, high availability and storage resource management.
"This is about collaborating on joint sales, marketing and
support of a broad array of services," said Rob Oderbery,
vice-president of business development at US-based NetApp.
Products jointly developed by Veritas and NetApp are due out in
autumn.
In the meantime, both companies will focus on offering six
services: a storage backup-and-restore application for Network Data
Management Protocol; a disc-based backup using Veritas' Netbackup
software to NetApp's Nearstore array; a data migration service with
Veritas' Netbackup Storage Migrator and NetApp's servers;
replication with Veritas' Volume Replicator to NetApp's arrays; and
an Oracle database performance optimiser using Veritas Cluster
Server and NetApp storage.
The two companies are also offering a storage resource
management service that uses Veritas' Storagecentral software to
manage NetApp's storage servers for consolidated management of
storage area network (San) and network attached storage (NAS)
systems.
While NetApp and Veritas were touting their expanded
relationship, a NetApp official was less forthcoming about the
prospect of a partnership with Microsoft. Rich Clifton,
vice-president of NetApp's San/iSan business unit, stopped short of
using the word partnership in relation to Microsoft. He instead
described the two companies as having synergies and said NetApp
plans to use Microsoft's iSCSI driver and Multipath I/O software in
upcoming San and NAS servers.
NetApp is considered the last major storage supplier to hold out
against a partnership with Microsoft on its Windows-based NAS
platform. "We are the leaders on the target side, and they are on
the host side," Clifton said. "I think there is a lot of alignment
around that whole space."
Clifton said NetApp would use Microsoft's iSCSI driver as
software for connecting low-end Intel servers to its storage
subsystems. "The iSCSI phenomenon is going to be a play in the
market. The speed of its growth, I think, has been
underestimated."
Clifton also said NetApp will shun proprietary load-balancing
software, such as EMC's Powerpath, opting instead for Microsoft's
Multipath I/O application for its fault tolerance and failover
capabilities. The applications ship as a device development kit to
third-party partners such as EMC, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, Veritas
and NetApp.
Lucas Mearianwrites for
Computerworld