Controlling Your IT Destiny: Exclusive interview with Linux director for Veritas

Kevin Bedell, recently had the opportunity to ask Ranajit Nevatia, director of Linux Strategy for VERITAS, a few questions about how Linux is impacting VERITAS and how the company is contributing to the world of open source.

So, can you tell me how Linux is impacting your business?

The impact has been positive for VERITAS. Linux is one of our fastest-growing platforms. Lately, customers have started to deploy Linux for more business-critical applications. As such, we've seen a marked increase in demand for our high availability and storage infrastructure products on Linux. Customers are also looking for ways to incorporate Linux into their overall data center strategy to deliver IT services and drive down costs. To achieve this companies are adopting utility computing methodologies as a way to deliver IT as a measurable service, aligned with business needs and capable of adapting to changing demands. We're helping customers bring the flexibility and TCO benefits of Linux into the data center without compromising service levels. Basically, we're helping them get even greater bang for the buck from Linux.

Do you see the impact as technology driven or customer driven?

The impact has been both technology driven and customer driven. From a technology perspective it has allowed us to provide certain of our products at a much better TCO to the customer. Most of our products have management servers that are independent of the platform they run on. On the other hand, the rest of the VERITAS infrastructure stack provides tremendous technology value to Linux by hardening the platform and enabling it for enterprise-class deployments.

From a customer perspective Linux has given companies much more control of their own IT destiny. Linux provides customers greater flexibility to customize and leverage emerging technologies, a greater choice of platforms and vendors, and the ability to take full advantage of commoditization. However, they still demand the higher levels of availability, performance, and storage management capabilities that they're traditionally used to. We're able to provide that to them and reduce the risks involved in migrating to and adopting Linux.

What about open source in general, how is that impacting your product offerings?

Our traditional strengths have been in providing value-added features and functionality on top of standard operating-system or application features. These enhanced features provide unprecedented value by integrating the infrastructure components both vertically and horizontally and in the process providing high levels of availability, performance, and automation.

Open source operating systems and applications require this kind of value-added functionality as much as, if not more than, the traditional proprietary counterparts. This has enabled us to provide our value proposition to a much broader market. In reality, what we're seeing most often is customers going with a mixed model in the data center, where they are combining proprietary applications with Linux. Adding Linux to an already heterogeneous data center creates even more requirements for tools that can manage across complex environments efficiently and with a high level of reliability. That's pretty much the sweet spot for us - our solutions are designed to bring more robust enterprise capabilities to Linux by tightly integrating with such leading open source technologies as Red Hat, Novell SUSE LINUX, and MySQL, as well as with technologies that take advantage of open source, like J2EE and virtual machine environments.

Which Linux distributions do you support? Do you have any partnerships with Linux distribution companies?

We have strong partnerships with both Red Hat and Novell SUSE LINUX, and currently deliver a broad range of products on both distributions. Our engineering and support organizations are also closely aligned to ensure solutions that are properly tested, certified, and supported on the back end.

What kinds of questions should technical management be asking their internal staff about Linux and open source?

They should ask:

• What kind of applications make sense to move to Linux or open source?
  
• Is my Linux data protected at all times?
  
• Are user spikes impacting or disrupting my Linux environment?
  
• How do I keep my Linux environment highly available?
  
• Are my internal IT resources equipped to manage and stay current on the latest Linux or open source technologies in order to support our customized Linux applications?
  
• Who do I turn to for support if there's a knowledge gap or something breaks in the middle of the night?
  
• Which applications are running on Linux that I can't afford to have go off-line?
  
• What is our failover, backup, and recovery plan if something does fail?
  
• How quickly are my data requirements growing ...and are storage costs bleeding the cost benefits of commodity Linux servers?
  
• Are we getting sufficient performance and functionality from the tools included (like file systems or volume manager) in our current distribution?
  
• How much administrative time is spent deploying and managing blade farms...and can those costs be controlled and reduced?
  

What kinds of questions should they be asking about their vendors?

They should ask:

• Does the vendor support standard Linux distributions, or do applications require modified or "customized" versions of the kernel?
• How committed are they to a Linux platform?
• Do they support their products directly or through a third party?
• Does the vendor offer only Linux OS solutions or does their functionality and expertise extend to other enterprise OS platforms like AIX, HP-
• UX, and Solaris?
• What's their future Linux strategy as it relates to such technologies as blades or 64-bit and grid computing?

Can you tell me about contributions to the Linux community that VERITAS has made?

VERITAS is active in the open source community. We have made Linux kernel contributions primarily in the areas of:

• Memory allocation
• Scalability and performance
• Networking enhancements
• Bug fixes to the Linux kernel