January 15, 2003

Mark Bregman
Executive Vice President, Product Operations
VERITAS Software, Inc
350 Ellis Street
Mountain View, CA 94043

Subject: Veritas for Solaris x86

Dear Mr. Mark Bregman,

I write to you today to request that Veritas support its product line on the Sun Solaris x86 platform. Most urgently needed are your flagship products: Veritas Volume Manager and VxFS.

I have been using Veritas Volume Manager since Sun announced your product on the Sun Model 100 storage array. That was over 10 years ago. I continue to use them in every environment I have ever worked in along with other products such as San Point Control, Net backup just to name of few that I have worked with.

Have spoken on the phone with your sales people in the past about supporting Solaris x86. It is my understanding that Veritas has previously available only thru NCR. Searching the NCR website reveals no trace of Veritas products; or, if present, they are impossible to find.

My colleagues and I are requesting Veritas to make current versions of Volume Manager and VxFS available for Solaris x86. In a Solaris centric environment, it makes complete sense to have a common version of the Veritas products available on all Solaris platforms.

SANs (Storage Attached Networks) are very popular and we currently connect to them, from Solaris x86 platforms, using HBAs (Host Bus Adapters) from Emulex, Qlogic, and Agilent. We wish to use Volume Manger and VxFS to manage that storage and realize that NCR has no interest in providing that capability because Solaris x86 is not their primary platform.

I appreciate that there is additional resources required to support another platform, however, since Solaris x86 is almost identical, from a developer’s perspective, to Solaris on SPARC, that additional cost would be minimal.

We wish to see Volume Manager and VxFS fully supported on Solaris x86. Additionally, we'd like to see all the current SPARC based products made available on Solaris x86. This would enable broader deployment of Veritas products across the enterprise.

I appreciate your attention into this matter and we look forward, with your permission, to sharing your response with the larger Solaris x86 User Community.

Sincerely,
Phillip B. Bruce