Veritas closes in on Ejasent agreement

Storage giant agrees to pay $59m for California-based vendor

Veritas has agreed to buy privately held storage virtualisation vendor Ejasent for $59m.

California-based Ejasent's two core products, UpScale and MicroMeasure, are aimed at utility and on-demand computing, widely tipped as the future of e-business.

The all-cash transaction is due to be completed by the end of the month. Ejasent will then form part of Veritas' high-availability and clustering group.

Ejasent has 13 patents pending, 10 of which are in application virtualisation, and its products are currently sold through partnerships with Sun and EDS.

"I buy into Veritas' strategy for trying to grow into a multi-billion-dollar software business. It is a good story," said Tony Ruane, sales and marketing director at reseller RedStor.

"RedStor has been able to gain success from [Veritas' recent acquisitions] Precise and Jareva."

Ruane added that end-users want a simple life, and that with the new software RedStor can show value to the customer.

"My only concern is that the company might be taking too much on. Veritas has its hands full with the previous acquisitions," he said.

With its pointers and data, UpScale can move a complete application around systems in a data centre while running live. It does this by using an abstraction layer between the operating system and the applications.

Dr Chris Boorman, Veritas' vice-president of marketing for EMEA, said: "This offers non-disruptive application migration. It is a unique piece of technology that is very important to the concept of virtual computing.

"Previously, when recovering from a snap-shot backup, it was necessary to restart the application, which meant a delay. This now happens automatically - on the fly."

Ejasent MicroMeasure will measure individuals' usage of physical and logical data centre assets, such as servers, storage and application transactions.

Both products will ship under the Veritas brand in the second quarter of this year.

Last year Veritas bought Precise Software for application measurement, and Jareva for auto-provisioning of servers. Boorman said Ejasent's products are entirely complementary.

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