cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Veritas ensures InfoScale Zero-Day Support for new Red Hat releases

adongare
Level 1
Employee

In today's storage world, the most important thing is data; hence security and protection matter. All sorts of mechanisms are necessary to protect data at different levels. The operating system on each server is one of the crucial components when we deal with such data. Linux is a popular operating system used in many storage data centers with the "Linux kernel" one of the essential pieces to keep update-to-date.

Linux vendors provide updates periodically, the most important being security updates. Major updates typically bring new features and functionality while other minor updates include bug fixes, performance improvements, better hardware compatibility, or updated drivers for further hardware support. 

Veritas has customers who have deployed InfoScale software on thousands of servers. InfoScale is a cluster-wide solution with a highly available, performant enterprise storage solution. It has a complete stack involving kernel components at multiple levels in the stack. Due to these kernel components, when a storage admin needs to update the Linux kernel (operating system), the admin becomes dependent on Veritas to give the go-ahead for an upgrade.

Considering the complexity in kernel components in terms of development, testing, and bug fixing, supporting new patches and major releases take time, which results in customers waiting to upgrade their system. 

Veritas partners with Red Hat, through a program called ZDS (Zero-Day Support).ZDS_image.png

Our partnership with Red Hat provides us access to early pre-GA bits, code changes in pre-GA kernel, etc. These pre-GA bits are in phases such as Alpha, Beta, snapshots, and release candidate drops to enable phased development. Veritas has a fully automated test suite that tests each feature, including failure injection. These tests run on the complete InfoScale stack for each new pre-GA bits. This ensures that nothing brakes due to changes and dependencies between InfoScale kernel components and the Linux kernel. This also helps to catch obvious issues in the early phases. In the case a problem is found, Red Hat and Veritas work together to make that fix available in the next step of pre-GA bits.

Veritas has a team of kernel developers and QA who contribute to development and qualification efforts on each pre-GA drop. With the early access to pre-GA bits and the associated code changes, Veritas ensures it makes any changes required to the InfoScale components. This way, we provide our mutual customers the assurance that they get InfoScale support on new Red Hat releases on the day they are released, i.e., the Zeroth Day. 

Veritas makes sure to support each Red Hat release in major upcoming InfoScale releases. Additionally, the same support is added for other InfoScale releases wherever applicable. Check on sort for specific InfoScale version's support.

Recently we announced Zero-Day Support for RHEL8.2, found here.

@anil_dhaneshwar and @Subodh_Bhagat co-authored this blog post.