Symantec Enables Customers to Capitalize on New Storage Technology

Organizations Require an Optimized Storage Infrastructure That is Dynamic and Flexible

(11.12.09) - Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) announced enhancements to "Veritas Storage Foundation", "Veritas Cluster File System" and "Veritas Cluster Server", the heterogeneous storage management and high availability solutions for Unix, Linux and Windows environments. This release enables organizations to capitalize on new storage technology, such as solid state drives (SSDs) and thin provisioning, while continuing to reduce costs and complexity through improved performance and scalability. Additionally, near instantaneous recovery of applications is now possible with Veritas Cluster File System through tight integration with Oracle, Sybase and IBM DB2 - allowing for fast failover of structured information and near linear scalability.

"As organizations evolve to meet changing business needs, they require an optimized storage infrastructure that is dynamic and flexible," said Josh Kahn, vice president of Product Management, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec. "With this launch, Symantec is providing customers with the ability to effectively utilize the latest storage innovations - from SSDs to thin provisioned hardware and even virtual environments including Hyper-V - while also providing capabilities needed to optimize any storage or server platform. Storage Foundation gives enterprises the complete solution they need to transform their data centers and enable business success."

Solid state drive visibility

Symantec’s content-aware, dynamic storage tiering capabilities ensure organizations’ storage deployments remain cost-effective as they take advantage of new technologies that increase performance. This provides complete, coordinated server and storage visibility and policy based, non-disruptive information movement. Storage Foundation automatically optimizes heterogeneous storage environments, including those that contain both SSDs and traditional disk storage. Storage Foundation is the only storage management solution that can automatically discover SSD devices from leading array and server vendors and optimize data placement on SSD devices transparently.

Completing the thin provisioning ecosystem

Veritas File System enables improved storage utilization by integrating with the thin provisioning ecosystem. Announced last year, the Veritas Thin Reclamation API enables automated space reclamation for thin provisioning storage arrays and is now fully supported by Symantec partners IBM, 3PAR and Hitachi Data Systems with more hardware partners planning to follow suit. Storage Foundation is the only solution that discovers thin provisioned storage across heterogeneous vendors, while also enabling automated and online storage reclamation allowing organizations to stay thin over time.

Storage Foundation’s SmartMove technology together with Veritas Volume Replicator makes it easy for enterprises to migrate from thick to thin storage over any distance. Only the storage that is being used by the application is moved, making data and array migrations fast and efficient even across wide areas. Storage Foundation now provides users with unprecedented visibility into legacy volumes and thin volumes, along with efficient central management and automated storage reclamation. With Storage Foundation for Windows, these capabilities are now extended to Hyper-V environments allowing organizations to better manage both their physical and virtual storage environments.

Storage aware application clustering

With this release, Symantec adds enhancements to Cluster File System and Cluster Server, providing improved availability of Oracle environments. In contrast to traditional failover approaches, which require both application and storage to move to an alternate server, Cluster File System and Cluster Server provide concurrent access to information and require only the application to be moved. As a result, organizations can now failover applications running single-instance Oracle or single-instance IBM DB2 in seconds. These enhancements create a more robust, manageable, scalable and highly available solution for critical application and database environments.

Storage Assessment Service

Symantec also offers Symantec Storage Assessment Service to help organizations address their storage challenges and exploit the latest advances in storage optimization and management. With Symantec Storage Assessment Service, Symantec consultants assess the efficiency of a customer’s current storage environment and identify areas for cost savings. Symantec experts define the gap between best practices and the current environment, including people, processes, and technology, and assist in deployment of technologies such as Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server. (Symantec: ma)