Symantec Foundation 6.0 Creates Private Cloud On Existing IT

On Oct. 4, storage management vendor Symantec is releasing version 6.0 of its Storage Foundation and Availability Management software portfolio, which offers new tools to create a private cloud without the need to rip and replace existing IT assets.

With Foundation 6.0, customers will be able to deliver business services to internal and external users end-to-end in a heterogeneous IT environment, deploy storage for cloud workloads, reduce storage footprints through deduplication and compression, and manage the system through a single management console for monitoring operations and fixing problems.

The company gave a preview of the new portfolio recently to select reporters and tech bloggers at its offices in Mountain View, Calif. Executives at the preview repeated the message, "Getting the private cloud you need from the infrastructure you’ve already got."

In addition to Storage Foundation 6.0, products in the portfolio will include Veritas Cluster Server 6.0, Veritas Operations Manager 4.1 and Symantec ApplicationHA 6.0, among others. Symantec, a legacy vendor of anti-virus and other security software, entered the storage management space with its $13.5 billion acquisition of Veritas Software in late 2004.

One feature of version 6.0 is its ability to deliver virtual business services simply and reliably, says Mike Reynolds, a senior product marketing manager at Symantec. In a traditional environment, a business service is delivered through a Web server tier, an application server tier and a database server. If the application server goes down, it can quickly be started up, but the problem isn’t fully solved there.

"The problem is you’ve got to not only recover that single node, you’ve got to reconnect it to the database and the Web server and that, today, takes manual intervention. That’s problematic, so we’ve automated that process such that we’re reducing downtime," Reynolds says.

The new portfolio includes improved deduplication and compression technology that works across a variety of storage arrays, says Oscar Wahlberg, senior principal technical product manager of the Vx File System (VxFS) and Cloud business at Symantec. "There are compression solutions in the arrays and there are deduplication solutions at the NAS [network attached storage] vendor layer or in the array, but there’s nothing that can use the same technology across all of these different platforms and infrastructures, and that is really what we’re bringing," Wahlberg said.

With Veritas Storage Foundation, Symantec has seen file compression rates of as much as 70% and deduplication rates from 50% to 80%, he said. The more an enterprise can compress and deduplicate data, the longer its storage capacity lasts. Symantec is also offering storage templates to help customers provision and deploy storage more quickly, says Reynolds.

"They can basically provision storage based on the requirements of the application that they are bringing up online," he says, explaining that mission-critical apps could be attached to high-performance storage with automatic replication of data, while less important apps could run on less expensive Fibre Channel or SATA drives and not require replication.

The idea behind deploying a private cloud on existing IT is to take advantage of cloud benefits without the expense and disruption of new cloud infrastructure, says Don Angspatt, VP of product management in Symantec’s storage and availability management group. "There are a number of vendors out there saying, ‘Buy our cloud platform, buy our cloud-in-a-box,'" Angspatt says. "But the reality of the day is that no one’s going to spend another hundred million bucks when they have a billion dollars of a legacy investment that is underutilized."

Products in the portfolio will become available in early December, according to Symantec.

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