Almost one year ago, much before the Citrix acquisition, XenSource signed an OEM agreement with Symantec to include Veritas Storage Foundation into the once called XenEnterprise platform.
Since that time nothing happened because the Citrix involvement implied a review of the whole deal.
Now finally the two companies are ready to go even if the final arrangement seems slightly different from the original plan.
Is not the hypervisor (Citrix XenServer) that embeds the storage management console (Veritas Storage Foundation) but the other way around.
The resulting product that Symantec announces today is called Veritas Virtual Infrastructure.
It features a unified web management console to provision virtual machine and storage partitions, to monitor the relationship between VMs and physical storage, and to analyze the storage usage.
Additionally, backups can be performed at storage level with a block-based approach (which also supports Microsoft Volume Shadow Service), without requiring the an entire virtual machine snapshot.
Last but not least the integration between the two products allow to create or modify storage pools in a transparent way for virtual machines.
The solution is expected for this fall at the price of $4,595 per 2 socket server.
The name choice is interesting and seems to imply an intent to compete with VMware.
Symantec has now some serious tools to achieve the task: the application virtualization and streaming products acquired by Altiris (Jan 2007) and by AppStream (Apr 2008) may be integrated in future versions of Veritas Virtual Infrastructure, giving the company a platform that can compete with the VMware, Microsoft and Citrix ones.
It’s just surprising that Symantec, the undisputed leader of mergers & acquisitions (at least in the IT security world), preferred to adopt the Citrix hypervisor rather than buying its own.