Veritas has reason to be excited. In addition to being a validation of its efforts to enter the server provisioning space, the Intel deal promises to lay a rapidly expanding market at the companys feet. According to a recent IDC report, worldwide blade server sales will be a booming $6 billion market by 2007. The analyst firm also expects that 35 percent of all servers shipped in the U.S. by 2007 will be in blade form.
Now Veritas has a good chance at grabbing a chunk of that market, according to The Clipper Group Inc. analyst Mike Fisch. Intel's plans to ship Veritas OpForce with its blade servers is a pretty big proof point that Veritas is breaking into server provisioning, he writes in an email. I think it has the will and wherewithal to break through.
And as Veritas wiggles its OpForce toes in Intels gigantic footprint, the company hopes some of the new customers it stumbles across may be interested in using the software on other platforms as well. We expect that there will be some customers that will get their first experience with OpForce on the Intel platform and want to expand that onto other platforms, says Toman. The company also wouldnt object if some customers decide to integrate OpForce with other Veritas software offerings, like its clustering, replication, and volume management products.
The deal, which, according to Toman, has been in the works since even before Veritas integrated OpForce into its portfolio, will also help the company move ahead with its so-called utility computing strategy. With this strategy, Veritas aims to help companies to maximize their resource utilization, and to deliver IT services in a measurable and flexible way. This is the server provisioning side of utility computing, Toman says.
Meanwhile, Intels surge into the blade server market also moves todays complex and crowded data centers one step closer to consolidation. While traditional server farms can be difficult to scale and are often complex and expensive to manage, blade server technology allows companies to stack independent servers within a single rack or enclosure. Each blade is an independent system with its own memory, processor, and network connection.
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