There have been numerous announcements on Grid Computing of late, prompted in the main by Oracle’s announcement of their 10g grid strategy.

There is a school of thought which places grid computing as a technical sub-set of utility computing, concerned as it mainly is, with a new network architecture.

UC: To what extent does Veritas see utility computing as a technical issue? Is this a subject the CEO should be paying attention to?

Jose Iglesias: Certainly. All senior executives should be looking at utility computing – if nothing else because of the pervasive nature of IT and the huge potential utility computing offers to IT.

Classifying which business applications have priority is certainly a business issue that needs to involve the CEO. The CIO and Network Manager then needs the tools that required to implement those policy decisions. That’s the correct flow.

UC: Is the Veritas definition of utility computing centred around the on demand, flexible sharing of computing power around the organisation?

Jose Iglesias: I believe it goes beyond that in a couple of different ways. What you see from a lot of the vendors talking about utility computing is them making available a lot of the resources available “on demand” so, for example, if you go to an EMP or IBM you can buy a fully configured system but the capability is delivered only as required and thus is priced in proportion.

What we’re doing is very different from that. We’re enabling our product to be metered out as and when it’s needed – and to track the usage. So if you reach 80% of your storage capacity you can either increase that capacity of not.

The tracking is a key part. Tracking the access, storage and processors enables us to set preferential rules for the access to storage or processors that mission critical applications have. So the user is in control of how the processing power made available –   not just how much of the application is made available.

UC: Are their particular industries that adopting this quicker than others?

Jose Iglesias: I don’t believe so. I see the adoption of utility computing as something that is happening across the board – primarily because of the cost savings available.

Adoption is driven by the current economic environment, in which IT costs are viewed fairly negatively. This model which allows us to meter out what’s required when it’s required is compelling. Just as we have Japanese “just-in-time-manufacturing” in the 80’s, now we have utility computing. This is “just in time” for IT resources.

UC: When this concept of metering out the required amount is applied to storage, does this lead to a rise in average storage levels?

Jose Iglesias: No – it leads to more control. We want to create the situations in which IT resources are managed according to business policies. You may, for example, never want to deny resource to the function controlling the processing of your sales orders. In contrast, you may choose to be strict with the data warehouse allocations of your marketing department. When they reach 80% of their capacity the system will alert you and you have the control to be able to allocate more or insist that they reduce their data.

UC: To what extent are the recent acquisitions Veritas have made a part of this?

Jose Iglesias: The Veritas offering is evolving and our two recent acquisitions – Precise & Jareva – are a big part of that development. They allow us to get into the application wares and middlewares space much more that we have in the past.

Our roots are with data; how it’s managed, protected and made available. Looking at critical middleware applications and email systems – they all live and die by access to data. Being able to start making the connection about the way that these applications deal with access to the data, all the way from the human interface with the application through the network to the data repository is very valuable. All of that is key to ensuring user satisfaction.

The Precise acquisition helps us to identify where a user’s system might have performance bottlenecks. Not only that, but the Precise dashboard gives analytics information – telling you which part of the application is working really well or, where performance SLAs are not being met. It then recommends corrective action.

Jareva adds to our utility computing offering considerably and is a very logical fit with Precise. It enables the user to identify the servers which are not being fully utilised and move applications from an overly burdened server.

UC: So – very similar to the HP Adaptive vision…

Jose Iglesias: Yes, although, we’d differentiate ourselves on the grounds that we don’t care whose brand or what processor is being used. One of the key principles of Veritas is to be platform agnostic, depending upon what platform needs for what application. Every customer I’ve met has a heterogeneous set of platforms.

Ultimately, our end goal is to allow customers to manage their environment more intelligently and with a more accurate cost profile.