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Veritas Bares More Metal

Two weeks after Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) kicked off its strategy to manage server resources as well as storage, the company has unveiled its first automated restore product aimed at heterogeneous server environments (see Veritas Automates Recovery).

Version 4.6 of Bare Metal Restore allows companies to automatically recover data from one server to another -- even if the two servers are not identical. That includes servers from different hardware vendors with different network interface adapters, storage devices, video adapters, motherboards, and CPU quantities and types, Veritas claims.

"This allows you to restore to a server with a different configuration," says Dianne McAdam, an analyst with the Data Mobility Group. "That's a pretty tough thing to do."

The new software version, which is based on technology that came with its acquisition of the Kernel Group early last year, is part of Veritas's utility computing strategy, which aims to fully automate the data center (see Veritas Moves up the Stack and Veritas Buys Kernels Original Recipe).

Bare Metal Restore 4.6 offers "dissimilar system restore" technology, which allows users to, for instance, recover Windows systems to completely different target hardware than the source hardware on which it was originally installed. (The servers must be running the same operating system software, however.) Veritas says this reduces the time needed to get the system back up and running, and also allows administrators of heterogeneous data-center environments to do away with the stash of unused systems and parts to match each one of the different server configurations they've been forced to keep just in case one were to break down.

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