Veritas lays down strategy for grid computing in China

Efforts to spur the mainland's adoption of utility computing are expected to heat up this week, as Veritas Software promotes key building blocks to establish the infrastructure in enterprises.

Utility computing - also known as grid computing - takes untapped application, storage, data and computing resources from different computing systems and makes them available where and when they are needed. The result is one virtual system.

Veritas chairman, president and chief executive Gary Bloom will headline the company's Veritas Vision conference in Beijing, where he will attempt to boost interest among large mainland organisations to pursue a utility computing strategy.

Through a series of recent corporate acquisitions, the Silicon Valley-based firm has developed a portfolio of storage management software products for utility computing.

Mr Bloom said many enterprises were looking at their storage infrastructure as a logical starting point for utility computing strategy.

Nancy Hurley, senior analyst at research firm Enterprise Strategy Group, said: 'The ability to automate across servers, storage and applications will be crucial to realising the promise of the utility computing model. This breadth and heterogeneity is important because utility computing, in its final form, requires a software layer that co-ordinates the whole infrastructure and allows it to operate as a single entity while meeting a spectrum of different requirements.'