Symantec Announces the Availability of Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 and Veritas Cluster Server 5.0, Enhancing Its Data Center Foundation Offering

WebKnowHow
Friday, July 14, 2006; 03:24 AM

Symantec announced the general availability of its Storage Foundation 5.0 family of products, providing public and private sector organizations with new visibility and control over complex data center storage environments. In addition to this new storage management offering, Symantec is releasing for general availability Veritas Cluster Server 5.0, a key component of the Veritas Server Foundation family. Veritas Cluster Server 5.0 is a proven solution for reducing planned and unplanned application and database downtime. Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 and Veritas Cluster Server 5.0 are core components of the Symantec Data Center Foundation solution family, the only offering that allows government and enterprise customers to standardize on a single layer of infrastructure software across their entire data center, enabling them to reduce datacenter complexity, improve service levels, and drive down operations costs.

Customers who leverage the Symantec Data Center Foundation can realize powerful operational benefits such as the ability to train their staff on one set of tools instead of dozens of disparate vendor-specific tools; enhanced negotiating leverage and flexibility in choosing among any major storage and server vendor; and improved utilization of server and storage hardware assets. In addition, customers can achieve significant direct cost savings. By standardizing on solutions like Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 and Veritas Cluster Server 5.0, enterprises can avoid purchasing duplicative server and storage software from multiple vendors, and realize significant storage hardware savings by moving data from high-cost tier one storage to lower cost tier two storage.

Storage Foundation 5.0 provides data center-wide visibility into the entire storage environment across all major application, server, operating system and storage platforms. Additionally, Storage Foundation 5.0 provides powerful centralized control over storage administration, enabling hundreds of systems to be managed from a single console and automating routine tasks to eliminate human error and time-consuming manual processes. In addition, with this release, Symantec provides users with the first synchronous release across all major UNIX and Linux platforms.

"IT organizations face the difficult challenges of managing exploding data volumes, delivering high service levels, and mitigating business risks while at the same time keeping costs under control -- all within a data center environment where complexity has grown out of control," said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president of Symantec's Storage Foundation Group. "With Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0, enterprises for the first time have centralized visibility and control across their multi-platform server, storage, and application environments. This release is a game-changer in helping our customers manage and optimize their data centers."

New in Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 is Storage Foundation Management Server, a unique offering that provides centralized multi-host management capabilities across UNIX, Linux, and Windows operating systems. Storage Foundation Management Server enables comprehensive visibility into application, server, and storage resources. It helps organizations achieve higher service levels by rapidly identifying risks and then offering resolutions to storage problems impacting business applications, while also reducing the risk of human error. An industry first, it provides data center-wide visibility by collecting real-time data from hundreds of Storage Foundation hosts, correlating that data to specific applications, and monitoring the entire environment. It also provides control, by enabling users to take action across those hundreds of hosts from a single, central console. Storage Foundation Management Server supports Veritas Storage Foundation 4.x and 5.0 as well as Storage Foundation Basic and Veritas Volume Replicator, thereby enabling customers to view and manage all such instances of Storage Foundation across the entire data center through a single, secure, and unified web-based console.

Based on the industry-leading Veritas Volume Manager and Veritas File System, Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 provides a standard set of integrated tools to manage explosive data growth, optimize storage hardware investments, provide comprehensive data protection, and rapidly adapt to changing business requirements. With 5.0, users can benefit from major advances in Veritas Storage Foundation's Dynamic Storage Tiering capability, which automates placement of files to the most suitable tier of storage, thereby driving down both capital and operations costs, as well as performance and scalability enhancements to the product's Dynamic Multi-Pathing feature.

Veritas Storage Foundation Basic is a free version of Storage Foundation designed specifically for edge-tier servers, which makes it easier and more affordable for enterprises to reap the benefits of standardizing their data center infrastructure software. This free version of Veritas Storage Foundation for edge-tier workloads such as Web, application, infrastructure, departmental, and test/development servers is designed for system configurations that do not exceed four volumes, four file systems, or two processor sockets in a single physical system. An enterprise support subscription offering for Storage Foundation Basic is available as an option.

A powerful server management offering from Symantec, Veritas Cluster Server 5.0 includes new features designed to reduce both planned and unplanned downtime, whether due to hardware failures, data center wide disasters, or server maintenance, by automating local and wide area application failover. Cluster Server 5.0 enables customers to monitor, manage, and report on multiple local and remote clusters from a single web-based console. To better guarantee the success of a disaster recovery strategy, Veritas Cluster Server 5.0 includes Fire Drill, a tool that automates DR testing, reducing the time, expense, and risk of the testing process. Because data center servers and applications are constantly changing, regularly testing a disaster recovery strategy is critical to guarantee a successful recovery in the event of a system or site-wide outage. IT administrators now have the ability to achieve unprecedented control and confidence in their systems as Fire Drill helps assure reliability and efficiency of their DR systems and processes.

Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 and Veritas Cluster Server 5.0 are critical components of the Symantec Data Center Foundation, the only integrated solution that enables enterprises to standardize on a single layer of infrastructure software across heterogeneous application, database, server, and storage platforms. The Symantec Data Center Foundation also incorporates Veritas NetBackup, Veritas Server Foundation, and Veritas i3 application performance management, and leverages a common integration platform linking the product families.