Veritas is back, believe me

Veritas Technologies (www.veritas.com), the leader in data management, just organized its Vision conference in Las Vegas but this time and for more than a decade, it was a pure Veritas show, no security stuff just data and storage management content. I have to say that even the term Storage Management very often associated with Veritas was very little used.

Ana Pinczuk, Chief Product Officer,
Veritas Technologies

In fact, the new company positioning is about Enterprise Data Management, back to the strong skills and attributes of the company, and everything was about Information as the key enterprise asset. I remember Veritas speaking about Protect Access Manage at the end of the 90's and now a updated message is user with Protect Insight and Availability.
It was an amazing conference with tons of products announcements, I will cover Data Protection part on my other blog dedicated to this topic here. We realize again that Symantec has frozen the product development at Veritas and all executives have the mission to fill the gap very quickly and introduce new stuff at a rapid pace. With these announcements, Veritas continues to articulate an unique value: 1 + 1 = 3 as the integration between Veritas product is key and offer some feature not available elsewhere.

Mike Palmer, SVP Data Insight & Orchestration,
Veritas Technologies

First back to old days but highly refreshed is InfoScale with multiple flavors. Then Veritas Access is a pure SDS solution able to offer a scalable object and file service on premise or in the cloud still based on the best file system and volume manager of the planet. But the product can serve as well as an aggregator of local storage and remote/cloud storage. The cluster is limited to 16 nodes as of today, not very large but enough for many enterprise deployments and agin the capacity could come from clouds. It offers NFS, CIFS, S3, Swift and of course FTP. There is also a plugin for Docker to improve the resiliency of such deployment model. It's interesting as Veritas finally understands what customers wish: they don't need an object storage, they wish a scalable storage platform, object-based or no, this is not the problem, the challenge is the scalability and object storage technology is just a technical detail that offers this aspect. And Access is exactly that. Even with that consideration, I have asked Mike Palmer is there is any plan for an object storage solution, purely SDS as well and able to scale in number of nodes so in computing power. The answer was interesting with an internal project to build a secondary scalable storage to store all data coming from many flow, a bit like Rubrik or Cohesity. Great.

Next, HyperScale for OpenStack is a scale-out block SDS dedicated for OpenStack infrastructure and targets Ceph replacements. This solution is currently under controlled release and you could apply to the EAP here.

Globally several leaders have insisted on partnerships, a key strategy in the past for Veritas, and strong ones seem to be Red Hat, Docker, Amazon and Microsoft.

Also a very good news is the return of Mark Leslie, former CEO and Chairman of the company, before the acquisition and before the reign of Gary Bloom, at the board of directors. We'll enter in a new Veritas Era, believe me.