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Veritas snaps up storage product line

Veritas Software plans to announce that it has acquired storage management software from privately held NTP Software.

2 min read
Veritas Software plans to announce Thursday that it has acquired a storage management software product line from privately held NTP Software.

The storage software maker is buying a product called Storage Reporter, which allows companies to make better sense of what types of files are filling up their storage. Veritas did not announce terms of the deal but said it is effective immediately. The company also is gaining 10 engineers from Manchester, N.H.-based NTP.

While Veritas already has software that allows companies to see how much of their overall storage resources are being used, the newly acquired software looks at storage usage at the file level, allowing companies to see which files are taking up space or how much capacity each department is using.

Customers had been requesting such software from Veritas, said Rajesh Radhakrishnan, the company's director of product marketing.

"It's a time-to-market issue," Radhakrishnan said, noting that Veritas could have developed similar software, but acquiring the product will allow the company to offer it sooner. "It's a perfect fit."

Part of the Storage Reporter software allows companies to try and predict their future storage needs. With storage costs coming down at some 30 percent a year, Radhakrishnan said, there is big value for companies in being able to know whether they can afford to, say, delay their next purchase of storage gear by three months.

The newly acquired software also lets companies see how much of their storage is going to a particular type of file and make changes. If, for example, many different people have the same company presentation stored, a company might choose to archive one copy.

"You can also say, 'There are too many MP3 files' and put a ban on them," Radhakrishnan said.

Radhakrishnan would not state exactly how much Veritas paid for the acquisition but said, "It was very cheap."

Veritas is known for making software compatible with gear from Sun Microsystems but has been expanding into other environments such as Linux and IBM's Unix servers.