Veritas: The Price of Independence


Veritas
350 Ellis St., Mountain View, CA 94043
(650) 527-8000 / www.veritas.com
Ticker: VRTS
Exchange: Nasdaq
Employees: 5,647

Gary Bloom
Chairman, President, CEO
In 2000, joined Veritas from Oracle, where he led the company’s core database business.

Mark Bregman
Executive VP, Product Operations
Oversees engineering and product management departments. Was CEO of AirMedia, a wireless Internet firm, and spent 16 years at IBM.

Jeremy Burton
Senior VP, Chief Marketing Officer
Responsible for corporate, product and field marketing. Joined Veritas in April 2002 from Oracle.

Products
SANPoint Control tracks and manages storage resources from different vendors. Also tools for moving and accessing data across heterogeneous systems, including File Manager and Volume Manager, and for managing storage for specific applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, and the IBM DB2, Oracle and Sybase relational-database management systems.

THE PRICE OF INDEPENDENCE

Are you willing to pay a premium to avoid becoming too dependent on any single technology vendor?

For many companies using Veritas to manage storage, the answer is a qualified yes. Even as they keep a keen eye on controlling expenses, technology managers like Steve Rubinow, CTO of online trading exchange Archipelago, have decided it’s worth paying more for software to manage storage hardware from multiple vendors.

In fact, Rubinow didn’t compare storage management products before selecting Veritas for a storage consolidation project built on a new Hitachi storage area network (SAN) and existing Compaq direct-attached disks. “Am I paying too much? It’s hard to say,” he says. “Since I know we’ll never have a single vendor environment for storage hardware, I wanted a tool that would work with anything.”

At Deloitte Consulting, CTO Eric Eriksen picked Veritas SANPoint Control to manage IBM, EMC and Compaq SANs deployed in five company data centers. Using Veritas allows Deloitte to save on training and staffing, says Eriksen. Rather than training administrators to use three or four different storage management tools, there’s only one to learn.

“We are paying a bit of a premium for Veritas, but we’re making up for it on the total cost of storage ownership,” he says.

In its main data center, Deloitte has no more than two staff managing storage, less than needed under an earlier arrangement. “And we had less control because we were very inefficient at allocating disk space,” Eriksen says. (An estimate of the cost savings wasn’t available.)

Yet some customers say Veritas can’t do it all, so they need to mix in software tools from their hardware vendors. Nielsen Media Research’s John Caddigan, for one, uses Hitachi shadow-imaging tools to create backup copies of data on his HDS Lightning 9960 SAN. Although he’d like to use only Veritas, the Hitachi tools work better for some nitty-gritty SAN management tasks. He says he doesn’t want different software tools for different storage systems. “That means more training expense on top of software licensing costs,” he says. “That’s not possible right now.”