Veritas Unveils SQL Server 2005 Support for High Availability Software

by Alex Woodie

When SQL Server 2005 becomes available this fall, Veritas will be there to support it with its storage virtualization and high availability software, the vendor announced last week at the Microsoft TechEd conference in Florida. Veritas says it will support the new database with its Storage Foundation High Availability (HA) for Windows software, as well as its i3 toolset, which will provide performance optimization for SQL Server 2005 and .NET applications.

Veritas' Storage Foundation HA for Windows reduces downtime by separating the storage requirements from application requirements in Windows environments. The software centralizes the setup and management of disk arrays and storage area networks (SANs), and enables organizations to make data and databases (including SQL Server, Exchange Server data stores, and Oracle databases, but not DB2) available to other devices with a click of a mouse. On top of this foundation, Veritas provides several add-on modules, including mirroring of data to remote locations through the Volume Replicator option, disk path failover and load balancing with the Dynamic Multipathing (DMP) option, backup and recovery functionality through the FlashSnap option, and support for Microsoft cluster services.

SQL Server 2005, the next release of Microsoft's database software, will ship in November (see "Yukon, Whidbey Get Formal Launch Date"). Storage Foundation HA for Windows version 4.3 will support the latest Community Technology Preview (CTP) version of SQL Server 2005 when it ships in July, Veritas said, with support for the final SQL Server 2005 product available when it ships in November.

Storage Foundation HA for Windows 4.3 will also add support for the new X64 processors from Intel and AMD. In terms of storage arrays, the new release will also support Hitachi Data Systems TagmaStore USP models 100, 600,and 1000; Hewlett-Packard 's SureStore E Disk Array XP12000; and IBM's TotalStorage DS8000, all via Microsoft's multipath I/O driver architecture. Pricing for Storage Foundation for Windows starts at $695 per server

Veritas' i3 database and application performance tools will provide day-one support for SQL Server 2005, as well as version 2.0 of the .NET Framework, which is also due this fall in Visual Studio 2005. i3 is designed to monitor, analyze, and tune SQL Server 2005 and .NET applications to identify potential bottlenecks before they hurt performance. As with the Storage Foundation software, i3 will support the latest CTP of SQL Server 2005 when the next release of i3 ships in July.. Pricing for i3 for .NET starts at $1,500 per processor, while i3 for SQL Server starts at $1,000 per processor.

Other Veritas products will also be supporting SQL Server 2005, a Veritas spokeswoman confirmed. NetBackup 6.0, which is due to ship in October and is targeted at larger organizations, will support SQL Server 2005 when the new database becomes available this fall, she said. The current version of Backup Exec, a backup and recovery product that's popular among small and medium size Windows shops, will not support SQL Server 2005, but the next version will. Backup Exec version 10 started shipping about a year ago.

In other news, Veritas is claiming the lead in the market for backup and archiving software. This week the vendor said that an IDC report shows Veritas owns a 41.6 percent revenue share of the market for backup and archive storage software by revenue, and it's nearest competitor, the Legato division of EMC, had 13.5 percent share for the quarter. Veritas also claims the top spot in IDC's reckoning of the file system software market, where Veritas says it owns 36.6 percent of the market by revenue.

This article has been corrected since it was first published. NetBackup 6.0 did not become generally available in April, as the article originally stated. NetBackup 6.0 is currently slated to ship in October. IT Jungle regrets the error. [Correction made 6/15/05.]