Symantec has unveiled a large number of updates to its Storage and Availability Management platform, confirming details exclusively revealed by CBR earlier this year.
Speaking exclusively to CBR in August this year, Anil Chakravarthy, SVP of the Storage and Availability Management Group, told us that new versions of ApplicationHA, Veritas Cluster Server and Veritas Operations Manager and more were being readied.
Now at its Vision event in Barcelona Symantec has taken the covers off the updates. Version 6.0 features a number of refreshes of products Symantec acquired as part of its $13bn purchase of Veritas in 2004.
The main aim of the raft of updates is to help companies set up resilient private clouds using their own existing infrastructure rather than facing the upfront costs associated with buying new equipment. Symantec says the new products should enable organisations to manage entire business services end-to-end, with the addition of built-in resiliency even if the business is running across cross multiple virtualisation technologies, operating systems and storage platforms.
One of the new elements that Chakravarthy outlined to CBR earlier this year was the introduction of what he called a "virtual business service". This service has now been fully introduced and it works by treating applications that may be spread across disparate platforms running different operating systems and virtualisation technologies as as single entity.
The full, exhaustive list of updated products that make up the Storage Management & Availability platform is: Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, Veritas Operations Manager, Symantec ApplicationHA, Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing, Veritas Cluster File System, Veritas Replicator, Symantec VirtualStore and Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows, Oracle RAC and Sybase ASE. All products are listed as version 6.0, expect Veritas Operations Manager, which is version 4.1.
Storage Foundation introduces deduplication and compression at the file system layer and support for thin reclamation, storage tiering, dynamic resizing and smart migration, Symantec said. Veritas Operations Manager provides a single management console across both physical and virtual servers and enables IT to provision storage using policy-based templates, the firm claimed.
Introducing the new system, Symantec CEO Enrique Salem that the perilous economic situation is forcing IT to, "re-think the way they work as ‘business as usual’ will not work any more. We want to help organisations to build a private clouds that are highly scalable and cost-effective on their current infrastructure."
