VERITAS Software provides alternative to expensive hardware controllers in HP Kayak PC workstations

VERITAS Software has announced that Hewlett-Packard Company will be the first vendor to bundle VERITAS VxCACHE, a specialised software solution designed to improve disk I/O performance, in its dual-processor HP Kayak XU800 PC Workstations.

Seamlessly integrating into either the Windows 2000 LDM (logical disk manager), which is based on VERITAS Volume Manager technology, or standard Windows NT 4.0 Disk Administrator, VERITAS VxCACHE extends the abilities of the standard disk-management tools and provides cache-accelerated RAID-0 at no additional cost to the customer. HP will ship VxCACHE under its FastDISK branding, offering customers improved performance at better prices within the Windows NT workstation market.

VERITAS VxCACHE delivers performance gains to the high-end Windows workstation environment by optimising disk head movement during system I/O. Suited to high-end workstation applications that require fast sequential access to read and write large files, VERITAS VxCACHE minimises disk head movement (a primary bottleneck in overall system I/O performance) to accelerate data access speed. The product provides this performance boost as a pure software solution, completely eliminating the need to implement a costly and difficult-to-manage hardware solution to achieve similar results.

VERITAS Software was selected by Microsoft to develop logical volume management software for Windows 2000. The technology includes support for software RAID 0, 1 and 5 and allows centralised storage configuration without the need to reboot the system or take the storage offline. In addition to the volume management capabilities included with the Windows 2000 operating system, VERITAS Software is offering VERITAS Volume Manager, which delivers additional RAID functionality, performance tuning, enhanced clustering support and other online storage management capabilities required by enterprise NT customers. VERITAS Volume Manager also enables effective on-line storage management for emerging storage area network (SAN) environments.