VERITAS, currently conducting a beta programme for its SUSE LINUX products with customers in finance, banking, health care, government and technical computing, is planning to offer its core VERITAS File System, VERITAS Volume Manager and VERITAS Cluster Server software products on SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server in Q1 of 2004. VERITAS Foundation Suite and VERITAS Cluster Server software have become the de-facto standard in mission-critical Fortune 500 enterprise environments. Making them available for SUSE LINUX provides customers with the key building blocks to construct a highly available, scalable and performance-driven Linux infrastructure.

"IDC is seeing a transition in the Linux market where customers are increasingly looking to Linux as a solution for database and application deployment. The introduction of enterprise-oriented Linux distributions supports this shift", stated Al Gillen, research director, system software at IDC. "With Linux as one of two operating systems expected to grow in new license shipments and installed base through 2007, VERITAS' support for SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server will enable SUSE LINUX customers to create software configurations that increasingly approach Unix functionality."

Industry leaders IBM and MySQL have announced support of the VERITAS and SUSE LINUX partnership citing key benefits for customers who want to leverage Linux solutions to help reduce operational IT costs and simplify the management of complex storage environments.

In addition to hardware suppliers, database providers also support the new SUSE-VERITAS partnership. "Open source software is increasingly being used to solve high performance computing needs, across all industries", stated Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database. "Customers will benefit from increased choice for deploying MySQL applications with enterprise-level availability and performance on Linux with new open source solutions from MySQL partners, VERITAS and SUSE LINUX."