Veritas signs Ejasent for virtualisation

Veritas Software has agreed to buy privately held application virtualisation technology company Ejasent for $59m (£32m).

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 deal is due to be completed by the end of this month, when Ejasent will form part of Veritas Software's high-availability and clustering group.

Ejasent has 13 patents pending, 10 in application virtualisation, and currently sells its products through partnerships with Sun and EDS, who also use them.

"This is a really neat deal. Veritas has bought the intellectual property," Hamish Macarthur, managing director of storage consultancy Macarthur Stroud, told vnunet.com.

"Look at UpScale with a view to utility computing. You aren't sure how many users are going to hit you but, if you are running out of reserves, it takes the whole application, all pointers and data, and spans it across different servers."

The software achieves this by placing an abstraction layer between the operating system and the applications, which can then be moved around different server and storage environments.

"This means non-disruptive application migration," said Dr Chris Boorman, Veritas EMEA vice president of marketing. "It is a unique piece of technology, 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."

MicroMeasure meters usage by individuals of physical and logical data centre assets such as servers, storage and application transactions. Veritas will use the software to enhance its CommandCentral Service system management offering, improving cross-enterprise service level reporting.

Both products will ship under the Veritas brand in the second quarter. MicroMeasure will be available on major Unix flavours, Linux and Windows. A Linux version of UpScale, currently only available on Solaris, has been slated for early 2005.