Even Data Center Support is now Showing up in the Cloud

Managing today's data center infrastructures is not for the faint of heart. Administrators have to verify new gear works with existing gear, existing gear works with other existing gear in new configurations and current configurations will not fail under peak loads. While vendors provide hardware and software compatibility lists in efforts to help administrators address this task, there is still usually more work than hours in the day to verify all of this gear is optimally configured and in an optimal state. It is this void that the new Veritas Operations Services seeks to fill.

Veritas Operations Services is a new cloud based service offering that proactively identifies best practices and optimal configurations for Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) environments. Veritas Operations Services is available as a cloud-based offering so Symantec can gather data from multiple corporate data centers from different companies, aggregate it and then use it to identify configurations that work as designed as well as spotlight those that are problematic in nature. It started out a little over a year ago with customers using it under the name of the Veritas Storage Foundation Prep Utility but has evolved to a full fledged offering that already has over 500 Symantec customers taking advantage of this new service.

In its first iteration, Veritas Operations Services offers two services: the Veritas Installation Assessment Service (VIAS) and the Veritas Storage Foundation Health Check.  
VIAS uses an agentless technique to proactively collect data across an organization's servers and storage. Once the information is gathered, it creates an XML report detailing which server and storage configurations are up-to-date as well as those that are in need of attention.
 
The Veritas Storage Foundation Health Check takes the next step beyond VIAS in that if a problem is identified, it helps companies map out a way to remediate the issue. For instance, VIAS may detect that Oracle Disk Manager (ODM) is not enabled on the production server. Health Check takes that information and evaluates it light of the application running on the server. If it detects that Oracle is in use on the server but not performing optimally, it will recommend to the Oracle database administrator that one step they can take to improve the performance of Oracle on that server is to enable ODM on it.

This is just one example of the type of problems that companies can address using Veritas Operations Services as they look to improve the availability and reliability of their data center infrastructures. Other benefits that Symantec anticipates Operations Services will provide to companies includes:

• Leverage information gathered from multiple different organizations to create a common repository of information that everyone can benefit from
• More readily disseminate information throughout multiple organizations to include Symantec's own support team
• Proactively notify companies when they are running configurations that have resulted in problems in other companies and under what circumstances
• Creating a collaborative, cloud-based service offering so companies can confidently outsource their function to Symantec and yet know their needs will be met

Complex data configurations and overwhelmed administrators are not an ideal mix for ensuring maximum uptime, availability and optimal configurations in today's data centers. At a cost of $500 per server, or at no charge for servers with Veritas Storage Foundation that are currently under maintenance, Veritas Operations Services takes these concerns off administrators' plates while providing them a wealth of information that they can tap into and use to create a more stable environment. In so doing, it removes a major burden for data center managers while providing them the means to verify existing configurations are running in an optimal state while giving them the freedom to take advantage of technology advancements more quickly and configure them correctly from the outset.