Symantec Upgrades Storage Management Products

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Symantec on Tuesday introduced a large number of enhancements to its Storage and Availability Management (SAM) Group 6.0 products that make it easier for IT to build and manage private clouds that are secure and highly available private clouds. It also added a feature called the Virtual Business Service that orchestrates management across all SAM products. The company is also announcing a new pricing model for its SAM products in which a customer pays based on usage.

The products in the SAM family include Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, Veritas Cluster File System, Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing, Veritas Operations Manager, Symantec ApplicationHA, and Symantec VirtualStore 6.0.

The Virtual Business Service is a model that integrates the Web server, application, and database silos, which are normally handled as separate tiers. It lets IT define policies for different tiers of service to each silo through Veritas Operations Manager. The idea behind the Virtual Business Service is that applications run on several tiers of storage--Web server, application and database tiers--and with different operating systems and virtualization technologies. This business service encapsulates the recovery services so that recovery can be automated, testing can be performed, and the service can be managed and storage consumption be charged for.

In Veritas Cluster Server, the company's high availability clustering software for Unix, Linux, and Windows, Symantec is introducing multi-tiered application high availability and disaster recovery. Veritas Cluster Server also implements the Virtual Business Service. With Symantec ApplicationHA, which runs in a guest operating system and provides failover and recovery for business-critical applications such as SAP or PeopleSoft, the company is introducing support for Linux and Unix virtualization using KVM, Sun Logical Domains, and LPARs in AIX pSeries servers, vSphere 5.0 support, and integration with the Virtual Business Service.

Storage Foundation HA for Windows now supports failover in about a minute for business-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, and application recovery for Hyper-V virtual machines across WANs and clusters of servers. It also supports the migration of Hyper-V virtual machines while maintaining storage connectivity and integration with Symantec's Virtual Business Service.

Symantec has also announced a new product called Veritas Replicator, which provides file-based replication across heterogeneous multi-vendor storage. Veritas Replicator differs from Veritas Volume Replicator in that it doesn't replicate entire volumes and reduces CPU overhead.

Veritas Storage Foundation, Symantec's heterogeneous storage management system that is based on the Veritas Volume Manager and Veritas Cluster File System, now includes deduplication, compression, and predictive visibility into storage reclamation on thin provisioned storage so overprovisioning does not occur. And it offers improved checkpoint visibility so IT can perform predictive analysis to estimate their storage utilization and capacity.

The Veritas Cluster File System also now includes the same enhancements as Veritas Storage Foundation, as well as automatic file system self-tuning for defrag and file system check (FSCK). FSCK is used to check and optionally repair one or more Linux, Windows, or Unix file systems. Additionally, Veritas Cluster File System has improved detach policies for increased application availability when nodes leave the cluster.

Veritas VirtualStore, Symantec's clustered NAS product for virtual machine management, now is able to clone virtual machines using FileSnap and de-duplication. It can replicate VMware "golden image" (VMDK) files across sites and has support for iSCSI.

Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing has improved support for mid-range arrays such as the EMC Clariion or HP Enterprise Virtual Array that implement Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA). With ALUA, storage LUNs are reachable across both storage processors at the same time. The software also has faster performance and path failover and expanded support for AIX VIO Server and KVM guest environments.

Further, Veritas Operations Manager, Symantec's storage management platform for Storage Foundation and Cluster Server, now has improved visibility into the mapping of applications to storage, templates for provisioning storage by workload tier, visibility and management of business services and thin pool storage alerts, so when the consumed size of the thin pools reaches a certain level, Veritas Operations Manager raises a fault alert.

Veritas Operations Manager can now also reclaim data from hundreds of VxFS file systems with a single operation and IT can set file system policies to grow file system capacity on-demand. A new product, Veritas Operations Manager Advanced, also includes deep storage reporting and usage-based chargeback.

Of interest to IT managers, SAM 6.0 now has a simplified, uncomplicated pricing model. In SAM 6.0, users pay only for the software they are using based on the number of server processor cores being protected. When the need for storage shrinks or grows, the pricing changes. As new virtual workloads are added, the pricing can also change.

Deni Connor is founding analyst for Storage Strategies NOW, an industry analyst firm that focuses on storage, virtualization, and servers.

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