Veritas chief sees SANs becoming more strategic

Storage area networks (SAN) are increasingly being used as a strategic weapon in companies' IT armouries - and not just as good back-up solutions.

Robin Purohit, senior director of SAN and clustering at storage specialist Veritas, said that he's watched SANs become more central to business processes.

In an exclusive interview with Silicon.com, he claimed: "[The market] is just starting to take off."

Purohit denied that storage area networking is just the latest example of industry hype, and added that they are fundamental to any businesses wanting to implement clustering.

He said: "They are very real. In fact, more and more of the aggressive deployers... are actually coming to us and saying: 'We want SANs and we want clustering to power our overall Internet environment.'"

Purohit said SANs are the only way to support a fast-growing Internet business, because they enable more and more servers to be added to a cluster, while keeping systems running.

He also said that one of Veritas' key strengths is its support for heterogeneous environment. "We couldn't have made it to a billion dollar company if we weren't both a Unix and an NT company," he said.

You can watch the full interview in the Storage Channel (http://www.silicon.com/a36960 ).