News that Veritas Software, the California-based storage software company, has acquired Ejasent, Inc., a developer of products for utility computing, for $59 million, brings the era of utility computing closer.
Veritas says Ejasent’s technology provides it with “another key building block to enable utility computing in heterogeneous environments” – by which it means that the company can now make it easy for clients to shift software from one server to another, and monitor the use of computing power to generate pay-as-you-use billing. The aim is to provide computer power on tap when needed, in the same way as the utilities provide water or electricity.
Veritas is investing heavily in the concept of utility computing, both in internal R & D – the firm claims to dedicate a fifth of revenue to R&D – and by buying firms such as Jareva and Precisen (in 2003) and Ejasent.
Veritas says Ejasent’s technology dramatically improves availability and reduces costs for an IT utility. The company’s core product, UpScale, offers the ability to move an application from one server to another without disrupting or terminating the application. UpScale takes a snapshot of an application and its state, preserving all its current settings and data, and transfers it to a different server in near real time. Ejasent creates virtually no overhead in the application environment, allowing it to be used in even the most demanding, mission critical applications. This results in a significant reduction in the time and resources required for planned periodic upgrades and application maintenance for IT managers, thereby improving application availability and reducing costs for application users.
Ejasent’s other product, MicroMeasure, enables usage-based metering and billing of physical data center assets — including servers, storage, and additional devices — by specific applications and user groups. MicroMeasure will integrate into VERITAS’ CommandCentral Service product, further enhancing service level reporting across the enterprise.