Veritas Disses Dell/EMC As It Preps Big Info Management Push

“What’s worse than a lifetime of hardware with EMC?” Veritas’ ad in the Wall Street Journal read today. “An eternity in Dell.” With that one little dig, Veritas showed it’s ready to play once again with the big boys in the data storage world.

You might be forgiven for wondering what relevancy Veritas Technologies has in the storage business. After all, the company, which until recently was a tucked inside of security giant Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC), was primarily known for its backup and recovery software. Ensuring the availability of transactional systems is important, but hardly something to get excited about with so much else going on in the big data space.

But you might be mistaken in overlooking the Silicon Valley firm, which today kicked off its first annual user conference as an independent company in 10 years. In his keynote address at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, CEO Bill Coleman outlined how he intends to guide Veritas in its journey away from being a niche provider of enterprise data management tools into becoming a trusted overseer of its customers’ information.

Veritas won’t stop providing data protection, availability, and metadata management tools. But as Coleman explains, the company intends to go beyond that foundation to help its customers get more value out of their data.

“We live in a world that’s getting more and more complicated,” Coleman said. “Your data isn’t just in your data center anymore. You’ve moved it to public clouds. You’re using SaaS apps and you have a private data center as well.”

Customers today need access to information wherever it is in order to glean insights in real-time, he continued. “We believe that requires an enterprise data management platform,” he said. “That’s our vision. That’s what we’re building. That’s what we will bring to you.”

Veritas Product Strategy

As Coleman explained, there will be three main aspects of this new platform.

First, it will be technology agnostic. “You can do what Google and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZM) do: When you need more storage, you just order a drawer full of just plain old disks, JBOD [just a bunch of disks], from Supermicro or Seagate (NASDAQ: STX), then throw them in your cabinet, and software takes care of everything.”

The second aspect is policy-driven lifecycle management, while the third is an open metadata management and programming framework. “This gives you the ability to query all of your data in real time, through the metadata,” Coleman said. “But it’s a lot more than that. It allows you to leverage other data, in combination with your data, to gain the true business assets that you need to be customer-driven, to be a digital business. And you can leverage applications for predictive analytics and machine learning to bring all this together.”

Clearly, Veritas isn’t just trying to sell NetBackup licenses anymore. The company is setting out to help customers leverage their business data through with a software-defined storage strategy. And if that means undercutting the products from EMC and Dell, such as high-end storage and VMware virtualization software, then so be it.

Two announcements made at Veritas Vision 2016 today relate to its software-defined strategy. First it’s enabling its NetBackup customers to store data on private clouds managed with OpenStack, in addition to Azure, the public cloud from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). Previously, it only supported Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

It also announced a partnership with Linux distributor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) specifically around OpenStack. The embrace of OpenStack means, for one, that Veritas customers “won’t have to pay VMware licenses,” said Ana Pinczuk, the chief product officer and executive vice president for Veritas.

“In addition to OpenStack, you also want to manage data on any infrastructure,” Pinczuk said. “To address this we’re also introducing Veritas Access, our scale-out network attached storage (NAS) solution, which allows you to seamlessly access data wherever it resides–on premise, off premise, on private or public clouds. This gives you the flexibility to deploy on any hardware, including commodity hardware, which will save money.”

Veritas HyperScaler for OpenStack will become available in the coming quarters, while Veritas Access is currently available in controlled release. Another key element of Veritas new product strategy–a data discovery tool called Information Map that was unveiled in January–is now available.

“Our goal is to enable you to preserve and capitalize on your data through visibility, action, and control,” Pinczuk said. “This is aligned with what many of you are doing in the business today, and around your own digital transformation.”

“We’re back,” Coleman declared. “It’s good to come back as an independent company.”