HP, Veritas bring in utility computing

Information technology majors Hewlett-Packard and Veritas have come together to promote a concept of utility computing wherein customers are charged according to the utilisation of servers instead of their mere availability.

Under a strategic alliance agreement announced today, Veritas products would be named as HP's preferred file system.

This agreement will enhance integration of virtualisation enabling HP customers to expand and contract server resources in real time based on business requirements and maintain service levels in the event of unexpected downtime.

Veritas Software, one of the 10 largest software companies in the world, is a leading provider of software to enable utility computing.

In a utility computing model IT resources are aligned with business needs, and business applications are delivered with optimal performance and availability on top of shared computing infrastructure, minimizing hardware and labour costs.

"The companies plan to integrate key products, including Veritas storage foundation cluster file system and storage foundation with HP service guard," Hemant Tiwari, director, servers and storage, enterprise, Hewlett-Packard India, said.

Under the agreement, the original equipment manufacturers will select Veritas Storage Foundation products in order to extend industry-leading virtualisation and high availability of HP's products to the Indian customers. This initiative will further ease customer evolution to high-end HP servers.

"Hewlett-Packard's strategic alignment with Veritas for clustering file services is a welcome change in HP's road map, since there is no need to re-invent the wheel," said Agendra Kumar, country manager, Veritas Software Solutions India Pvt Ltd.

"Our ties with Veritas are strengthening and the result of this alliance will reflect in the benefits that our customers receive. Our collaboration with Veritas helps us to deliver on our Adaptive Enterprise strategy and assists our UNIX customers in their evolution to next-generation platforms," said Tiwari.

With $1.75 billion revenues during 2003, Veritas delivers products and services for data protection, storage and server management, high availability and application performance management that are used by 99 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies.