Cross Roads

At Vision, Symantec announced its Veritas Virtual Infrastructure which basically combines storage management capabilities from Veritas Storage Foundation with the Citrix XenServer virtualization technology from Citrix Systems. It's an interesting idea -- to extend a server virtualization platform with its own built in storage management functionality, but it does raise the question of whether Symantec should partner with VMware as it has successfully done with its award winning NetBackup for VMware products (also including PureDisk) and with similar partnerships as it moves its security products into the virtualization world? Or is it better in the long term to compete head on in the virtualization arena directly against products like VMware's ESX and Microsoft's Hyper-V? Perhaps co-opetition is to the point where you can do both. WE always love a good fight -- we're looking forward to see how these battles shape up.