Veritas is teaming with Cisco to provide businesses with a centralized point of control to make it easier to consolidate isolated storage-area networks and create virtual pools of storage resources.

The companies this week are expected to announce the general availability of Veritas Storage Foundation for Networks on the Cisco MDS 9000 series of switches. Veritas specializes in software that lets storage administrators manage and provision resources across heterogeneous environments. Typically, volume management and storage virtualization is done at the host level, but Veritas Storage Foundation for Networks is for managing and provisioning resources at the network level.

Putting management into the network switch enables administrators to manage data across SANs built around specific applications and operating systems, says Ed Chapman, senior director of product management for Cisco's storage technology group.

"By having intelligence built into the network layer as well as having the ability to manage it with what they do from a host-based perspective, customers can easily move from managing silos of storage to managing their storage across different vendors," Chapman says.

That means users can get more out of the storage resources they have by more easily moving data from host to host. At the same time, management headaches are reduced because SAN islands no longer have to be managed independently.

Veritas Storage Foundation for Networks is licensed starting at $1,000 per port for the enterprise version.

Microsoft steps up

In other storage news, Microsoft last week gave the newly ratified iSCSI storage transport protocol a boost when the company announced that it was certifying hardware designed to interoperate with Windows environments. Microsoft says 14 hardware vendors, including Cisco, Intel and Network Appliance, have been certified.

Also,this week HP is expected to fill out its storage line with a family of low-cost products aimed at small and midsize businesses, as well as for enterprise workgroups and remote offices.