News

Veritas buys Ejasent to get with grid

• By Lana Gates
• February 3, 2004

Storage software provider Veritas Software Corp., Mountain View, Calif., has agreed to acquire Ejasent Inc., a supplier of application virtualization technology for utility computing, for $59 million. Observers said the Veritas move mirrors those by suppliers of various software types to beef up capabilities efforts in the so-called grid or utility computing world.

The deal is said by Veritas executives to build on Veritas' previous acquisitions of Precise Software and Jareva Technologies. Mountain View, Calif.-based Ejasent brings two products to Veritas' portfolio: UpScale, which offers the ability to move an application from one server to another without disrupting or terminating the application; and MicroMeasure, which provides usage-based metering and billing of physical and logical data center assets.

Officials contend that the Ejasent technology can help Veritas customers reduce IT management time, as well as the resources required for planned periodic upgrades and application maintenance. It will also allow IT managers to quickly migrate live applications to higher performance servers and back based on real-time, user/application demands, Veritas officials said.

Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director at Thinkstrategies, Wellesley, Mass., believes the acquisition ''is another indication that on-demand, utility computing is more than just marketing hype; it is gaining momentum as a new model for distributed computing power and business applications.''

He predicted that there will be many more acquisitions of utility computing-enabling companies like Ejasent in 2004. ''The merging of established companies like Veritas with enabling technologies companies like Ejasent will help to make utility computing a reality,'' he noted.

Ejasent will become part of Veritas' high-availability/clustering group upon completion of the acquisition, officials noted. Veritas expects to deliver UpScale software on Solaris, and MicroMeasure software on Solaris, Windows, Linux and HP-UX in the second quarter of 2004. A Linux version of UpScale is planned for release early in 2005.