At the Veritas Vision annual user conference in Las Vegas Monday, the storage software company said it plans to extend its products beyond storage and into the server management market. This will be accomplished by combining some existing software products with technologies acquired in its acquisitions of Jareva Technologies and Precise Software, according to Veritas Software officials.

The plan, explains Robin Purohit, vice president of product marketing at Veritas, is to initially release three point products that address server provisioning, performance management, and operations management this year and combine the functionalities of the three to release an integrated software platform that assists in the auto-deployment and ongoing management of both storage and servers by next year's user conference.

"Our strategy is unique because it is based on open software," says Purohit, who points out that server vendors tend to concentrate on supporting its own environment over supporting competing platforms. "IBM has taken a more services-centric approach while Sun has taken a hardware approach in their utility computing visions."

Purohit contends that with a software approach, Veritas can remain platform- and operating system- neutral -- something he says they've been able to do in the storage market.

Beyond Veritas' backup and recovery software, they also sell storage management products that address storage resource management across a mixed-vendor environment. Purohit says this technology will serve as the backbone for its plans to deploy and manage storage and servers on an ongoing basis.

"Lots of our storage stuff will be the building blocks for storage as a utility," said Purohit.

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