Quality of service (QOS) has established itself as a networking term, but with the advent of storage area networks (SANs), software vendor Veritas hopes to bring the concept to storage.
According to Neal Watkins, Veritas solutions marketing manager, IT departments are starting to bill other departments in their companies for use of storage. "When you start charging people for a service, they expect certain things - such as a service level agreement in some form."
Veritas`s QOS strategy revolves around time to recovery, survivability of data (in the case of a disaster), time to capacity (a capacity on demand model), and application performance guarantees. The model that it has drawn up for itself will guide it in delivery of its future products, and it hopes that other storage vendors will draw on it for product direction.
"The QOS announcement was made in the middle of March, and is the direction for future SANs. It`s the vision that the guys in the States have been seeing for some time now."
Watkins hopes that the QOS strategy will help users migrate their small SANs from tactical solutions designed for specific tasks - such as backup and recovery - to enterprise-wide strategic high availability SANs.
Veritas`s SANPoint Control 2.0 SAN management product will be the basis for the company`s QOS direction, combining with Veritas Volume Manager to form the foundation for Veritas`s capacity on demand offering next year. Its cluster and replication servers will help deliver data survivability, while its backup solutions will fulfil time to recovery needs.
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