The philosophy behind Storage Foundation is that organizations have storage-related problems to solve, and are not always aware of the products that they require. Storage United provides the ability to implement a number of products according to the issues faced by the organization.
There are four main areas that Symantec’s Storage United strategy is designed to address: data growth, low utilization rates, duplicate data, and space/power/cooling issues, which are often referred to as green IT issues. No one single point product can currently address all of these issues, and organizations generally implement a number of point products to solve these problems.
For example, they may undertake storage consolidation to address storage growth, and they may also deploy tools to monitor and manage the types of data that users are able to store, for instance, to prevent MP3 files from being saved. Virtualization addresses under-utilization issues, duplicate data can be largely eliminated by using deduplication products, and green issues can be addressed through technologies such as consolidation and virtualization.
Symantec is not the only storage vendor to have gone down the solutions route. Other vendors, including CA, have also moved away from point products to solutions that combine a number of products. The key to a successful solution is to be flexible in the products and features that can be implemented to address the specific requirements of organizations, and Symantec certainly offers this flexibility. One of the benefits of this approach is simplified licensing, for the licensing of products from many large vendors has become overly complex over recent years, as products have grown and become increasingly modularized.
Over the past few years, a problem for Symantec has been the number of acquisitions it has made and the need to integrate all of these pieces of functionality, which is still continuing, and this may limit the effectiveness of simplified licensing. This is likely to be an issue for the company until all of the integration work is complete, and organizations can purchase the same functionality that they have access to today, but with fewer products.
Symantec products that organizations may implement to provide a storage solution include: Veritas NetBackup for back-up and recovery; Storage Foundation, which provides a complete picture of the organization’s storage environment; and CommandCentral Storage, which provides a view from the application to the spindle.
Symantec Storage United is a positive move that should make it simpler for organizations to determine the functionality they require to resolve their storage issues, and in turn the products that will achieve this. Symantec’s Professional Services will be on hand to help organizations decide which products they require and, of course, this approach will drive Symantec’s revenues up further. However, this strategy will benefit customers and enable them to select the products to help them address their storage issues. Storage United certainly sounds refreshing after several years of listening to presentations from the vendor based on the theme of Utility Computing!
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
