This week Symantec Corp. is announcing version 6.0 of the company's storage management and high availability product set, intended as the cornerstones of private cloud infrastructures. The release spans multiple products in Symantec's portfolio, including its flagship Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0, Veritas Cluster Server 6.0, and Veritas Operations Manager 4.1, all integrated to help IT organizations move confidently to a private cloud architecture.
"The big theme is: getting the private cloud you want from the infrastructure that you have today," Don Angspatt, vice president of Symantec's Product Management, Storage and Availability Management Group, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Organizations have concerns about moving to hybrid or public clouds and those concerns have to do with security, availability and risk, says Angspatt, who notes that those issues were voiced by Symantec's top customers during meetings recently. "For them, the hybrid or public cloud was an absolute non-starter for all of those reasons," said Angspatt.
"We also do an annual survey, and our survey showed that 67% of IT professionals just were not confident at all about moving their mission-critical or business-critical applications to the private or hybrid cloud," Angspatt said. As a result, there is a lot of focus on what the private cloud means, and how they can get to that end state of a private cloud. It is a new consumption and delivery model for IT services and some organizations will decide to go full force into the private cloud while others view it as best in class IT for better aligning IT services with the business, says Angspatt.
Symantec's viewpoint is that the cloud it is not a platform or an infrastructure or a piece of hardware that you put in your data center, says Angspatt. It is five characteristics: pooled resources both on the storage and compute side, a dynamic or elastic pool of compute and storage resources that can be scaled up or withdrawn quickly, built-in resiliency, built-in agility, and a usage-based chargeback mechanism for paying as you go. "These are the five characteristics that we are trying to address in our 6.0 release," says Angspatt.
With this release, says Symantec, organizations can now manage business services end-to-end across heterogeneous platforms; deploy resilient, elastic storage for cloud workloads; reduce the storage footprint through deduplication, compression and thin reclamation; and use a single pane of glass for intelligent reporting and non-disruptive remediation.
Products announced as part of the release include:
- Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0
- Veritas Cluster Server 6.0
- Veritas Operations Manager 4.1
- Symantec ApplicationHA 6.0
- Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing 6.0
- Veritas Cluster File System 6.0
- Veritas Replicator 6.0
- Symantec VirtualStore 6.0
- Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows 6.0
- Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC 6.0
- Veritas Storage Foundation for Sybase ACE 6.0
According to Symantec, Veritas Cluster Server 6.0 and Symantec ApplicationHA 6.0 with their new Virtual Business Services (VBS) capability provide continuous high availability and reduce duration of service disruptions for entire multi-tier business applications by encapsulating them as a single entity. Administrators can orchestrate the start, stop, non-disruptive testing, and failover of entire multi-tier applications with a single click - resulting in resilience and mobility for the business service. Veritas Cluster Server is available on all major OS and Virtualization platforms including IBM AIX, HP-UX, Oracle Solaris, Linux, Microsoft Windows, and VMware.
In addition, says Symantec, the Veritas Storage Foundation product suite allows storage managers to choose the right hardware solution for their storage needs and complements the advanced functions in the storage arrays. Storage Foundation 6.0 now supports deduplication and compression at the file system layer. Along with support for thin reclamation, storage tiering, dynamic resizing, and smart migration, Storage Foundation brings comprehensive storage optimization capabilities to block-based SAN storage environments. All these functions can be run with no application downtime required and minimal performance impact with automated priority based I/O scheduling that distinguishes between application and maintenance operations. The Veritas Storage Foundation suite includes Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing, Veritas Cluster File System, and Symantec VirtualStore, with support for all major storage arrays and operating system platforms.
Veritas Operations Manager (VOM) is designed to provide a single management console across physical and virtual servers, helping customers visualize, analyze, and control business service availability and heterogeneous storage environments across data centers. IT organizations can provision storage using policy-based templates and implement chargeback based on real application storage utilization with Veritas Operations Manager Advanced. In addition to Veritas Operations Manager providing an application-to-disk view of the entire storage infrastructure, it allows also administrators to take immediate remedial action to optimize and scale storage utilization with Veritas Storage Foundation.
"Our 5.0 release was back in 2006 so this is a major release for us," notes Angspatt. "It is timed well because it is really addressing a big pain point today."
Many organizations are thinking about the cloud and while it shows great promise, Angspatt says, there is concern about security, availability, and risk of data in the public or hybrid cloud. But even with the private cloud, organizations have concerns about resiliency, high availability and management of storage growth and whether they can get to a model that is truly IT as a service, storage as a service, or a model that really replicates what some of the public cloud providers have in terms of cost, the infrastructure, and the agility, he notes. "That is why we are excited about 6.0. We feel that we address a lot of those pain points, and don't just help folks move to a private cloud, but take advantage of their existing infrastructure."
Additional information is available at www.symantec.com.