Veritas Expands Automation In Disaster-Recovery Line

Veritas Software added automation oomph to its disaster-recovery offerings last week by acquiring the Kernel Group. Veritas was after the Austin, Texas, company's Bare Metal Restore software, which automates system recovery of Windows and major Unix platforms if a server or an entire system goes down. Previously, Veritas had automation only for Windows NT. The Mountain View, Calif., company expects to have Bare Metal Restore packaged with its backup software, NetBackup, by the end of March. No financial details of the deal were disclosed.

Getting operating systems to run again is now a manual process, says Julie Stewart, a Veritas product-management director. Companies don't always have complete records of settings, so sometimes that information is lost, says Nancy Marrone, an analyst with Enterprise Storage Group. She says Bare Metal Restore's automation solves that.