Acquisition Adds Automation To Veritas System-Recovery Products

Veritas Software Corp. has added some automation oomph to its disaster-recovery products by acquiring privately held The Kernel Group (TKG) Inc. The software that will make it happen is TKG's Bare Metal Restore, which automates system recovery of Windows and major Unix platforms in case a server or entire system goes down. Veritas expects to have Bare Metal Restore packaged with its backup software product, NetBackup, by the end of March. No financial details of the acquisition were disclosed.

While most file recovery is fairly straight-forward--say, a single file or group of files inadvertently deleted--companies are more concerned about the potential for more extensive problems since Sept. 11, says Julie Stewart, director of product management for Veritas' NetBackup. Currently, it's a manual process to get operating systems up and running again, and very tedious to ensure all settings are returned to their original point. What's more, companies don't always have a complete record of settings, so sometimes that information is lost entirely, says Nancy Marrone, senior analyst for Enterprise Storage Group.

That adds up to time-consuming problems for systems administrators, and an expensive problem for the company, considering the lost business resulting from downtime. Bare Metal Restore's automation capabilities solve that, says Stewart. "A typical Solaris system might take anywhere from a half day to a whole day to get up and running before you even started restoring user data. Bare Metal Restore gets that down to 15 to 20 minutes," she says. Veritas chose TKG because its product covered the most platforms; previously, Veritas only had automation for Windows NT. "The same recovery methodology is employed for all platforms, so companies only have to teach system administrators once how to do this," says Stewart.

Veritas isn't the only company that's shown interest in TKG's product. IBM and Tivoli Systems Inc. had been working with TKG as resellers of Bare Metal Restore--and that makes Veritas' acquisition a good strategic move, says Marrone. "It gives them an advantage over IBM and Tivoli in this space. Moving forward, it may force IBM to find a solution on its own."