* What Candera's closure and Vertias/Symantec merger mean to you
The last few weeks of 2004 were a topsy-turvy time for storage vendors. Well-funded start-up Candera closed its doors, and industry heavyweights EMC and Veritas were involved in mergers that should strengthen both companies. Today, I want to share a few thoughts on Candera’s closure and Veritas’ merger with Symantec.
During its life, Candera sucked up $59 million in venture capital. It was unsuccessful in its efforts to bring Serial ATA (SATA) storage to the enterprise IT floor because it was not able to get a 4G-bit Fibre Channel product out the door in a timely fashion.
As a technology, SATA makes sense. It is a cost-efficient and intelligent investment for IT groups looking to support different valued data with multiple tiers of storage. IT managers should keep in mind that Candera’s failure had nothing to do with the disk drive technology.
On the merger front, Veritas combined with Symantec. Technically this was an acquisition by Symantec – the new entity will keep the Symantec name – but both sides are trying to position the event as a merger and I see little reason not to think of it that way.
The newly merged company makes plenty of sense – potentially, and here’s why.
I have been carping (karping?) about Veritas’ inattention to security for years, but Symantec’s security portfolio is extensive, even if it does perhaps appear to be somewhat disjointed. As you begin to put together a strategy for storage security, there is every reason for you to consider the new Symantec along with the already-established vendors such as Computer Associates, HP and IBM.
Managers wanting to provide secure storage will do well to make themselves a checklist of issues to discuss when their old friend, the now-rebadged Veritas sales guy, comes in the door. As storage administrators, you are likely to be most interested in what goes on inside the firewall, so for that list I suggest you try to figure out what the new company offers you in terms of inside-the-firewall data protection.
Keep in mind that although anti-virus software is clearly important, your needs extend over a wider spectrum. Keep in mind the requirement to protect data not only while it rests on your storage devices, but also while it is in transit over the network, while it is in use by the applications, and even while it is being managed.
(By the way, I fully expect most of you to keep on seeing the Veritas rep because Veritas, after all, was a much more pervasive player in enterprise storage than was Symantec in enterprise security.)
There are of course many ways to provide secure storage, so you had better make sure that any definition you use can be applied successfully to any compliance-driven storage security requirements. We’ll be looking at several of these over the next few months.
Next time: What to expect from EMC’s purchase of SMARTS.
