It has been a rough and tough 3 weeks and I missed writing my blog. Last week, the toughest of the 3, was my CompTIA Storage+ training to Symantec SEs in Malaysia. They were a great crowd, and I loved it but I was really tired after that.
One exciting news during that week was the ouster of long time employee, and CEO of Symantec, Enrique Salem and replacing him with Steve Bennett, their Chairman. The news of that unfortunate event can be read from here and here. And almost hours after that, the calls to break up the Veritas portion of Symantec came up and putting pressure on the board of directors in Symantec to either spin-off the entity or sell it off.
To be fair, many observers, including me, believed that the marriage between Symantec and Veritas in 2005 wasn’t really what you would call a “match made in heaven”. It was more like strange bedfellows to me. And there was an internal joke (one that I could not verify) about the Veritas CEO, Gary Bloom’s promise to the Veritas board when he joined them from Oracle in 2000.
It went like this:
“Gary Bloom promised the Veritas board of directors in 2000 that he would be able to bring Veritas to a USD$5 billion dollar company in 5 years time. Nearing the end of the 5 years in 2005, Gary fulfilled his promise by merging with Symantec, instantly making Veritas a USD$5 billion dollar company.”
Note: This is just an inside joke which I heard from a Veritas friend back in 2005, and by no means put Gary Bloom in a bad light. If I did, I apologize.
But back to the present. Our class last week brought up the subject of Symantec FileStore. When it first came out in October 2009, I thought it was an interesting solution. For once, I thought there was something could “out filesystem” NetApp’s ONTAP and WAFL, because Veritas had one of the best scale-out, clustered file systems. They just haven’t figured out the front end protocols yet, where NAS and iSCSI reigned. Veritas File System (VxFS) and Veritas Cluster File System as part of Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) was mature and proven in the enterprise. Along with Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM), this was perhaps THE best file system/volume management suite around. Mind you, ZFS hasn’t reached the level of prominence yet at that time.
