Symantec Enterprises Get Revolutionary Infrastructure with Evolutionary Products and Prices from Symantec Storage Foundation 6.0

In response to that Symantec yesterday formally unleashed a bevy of products and functionality that converts public cloud capabilities into what more enterprises want: private cloud realities.  Symantec's multi-product approach delivers a revolutionary infrastructure for enterprises across the globe.  To accomplish this, Symantec delivers integration, efficiency and licensing improvements with its Storage Foundation 6.0 line up of products:

• Symantec Applications HA

• Symantec VirtualStore

•  Veritas Storage Foundation

• Veritas Cluster Server

• Veritas Cluster File System

•  Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing

• Veritas Operations Manager 4.1

These seven products work like RADAR to help you manage and navigate your way in to and through todays cloud based infrastructures.  Traditionally, products like these were aligned in a marketing offering, but the technology afforded little integration with each other.  In this Storage Foundation 6.0 release from Symantec, these seven products deliver on three core revolutionary infrastructure themes that enterprise organizations want:

• Maintain resiliency

• Become elastic and agile

• Pool resources and meter

Symantec's unique approach to delivering this revolutionary infrastructure is rooted in its heightened focus on the capital expense budget within enterprises and tailoring the Storage Foundation 6.0 lineup to work with existing data center infrastructures.  Symantec has taken these three themes and evolved them into business critical pillars for the private cloud.  Symantec identifies three pillars as:

• Resilient Business Services. Resilient business service is more than just language; it is holistic and orchestrated approach to HA/DR across operating systems and virtual environments.  To do so in Storage Foundation 6.0 Symantec has integrated Veritas Operations Manager, Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) and Symantec ApplicationHA to achieve this goal.
  

These products work in tandem to tie an entire business service from server to storage, through to reporting.For example, prior to the Storage Foundation 6.0 release, Symantec customers typically had to architect HA/DR for a database and a web server separately as there was not a way to pool these resources for monitoring and management.

In this release the products are tied together to present your business critical infrastructure as a pool to make it more elastic and operate as a whole.  VCS, working with ApplicationHA, figures out if the error is in the web server, database or application/business rules.  Once identified, the products orchestrate an availability recovery that is both resilient and revolutionary.

• Resilient elastic storage.  Symantec continues to deliver on traditional storage features ranging from cluster file system to thin provisioning.  However storage and data management technologies have evolved in recent years with storage deduplication and compression taking some of the focus off of eliminating data.

In response, Symantec focused on delivering deduplication and compression as a core part of their resilient elastic storage so enterprises can create private cloud that expand, reduce, deduplicate, compress, optimize and chargeback across multiple vendor storage.

Deduplication can be enabled on a per-file-system basis and works by identifying duplicate blocks.  Once the duplicate blocks are identified, they are mapped to the same inode.  In pre-release testing Symantec was able to deduplicate virtual machine storage at a rate of 50% with the ability to achieve deduplication ratios of upward of 80%.

Compression can also be enabled on a per-file-system basis or specific files and/or directories but also makes provisions to exclude certain file types that are crucial for compression such as JPG, tar.gz, and ZIP files

To prevent compression and deduplication workloads from conflicting with production workloads, Symantec took two important steps. First, it configured them to operate as post process optimizations.  Second, it separated these optimization workloads from production workloads.

Yet what is arguably most valuable is that Symantec delivers these elastic storage capabilities for your existing storage as well as any new storage you purchase.  Utilizing their storage efficiency technologies enterprises can minimize the need for future purchases plus Symantec provides chargeback reports to justify the budget for these new purchases and identify those who should help pay for it.  

• Information to action. Resilient business services and elastic storage generate a lot of information about whole systems and infrastructure operational efficiency.  To accommodate this data growth Symantec extended its Veritas Operations Manager with Veritas Operations Manager Advanced.  The advanced version integrates Operations Manager's reporting capabilities with the remediation capabilities of other Symantec products.

For example, say a volume is over subscribed.  In this release administrators only need to do a left mouse click and chose from "Options."  Options include resizing, restore, snapshot, mirror, etc and so they can execute a resize and convert it to a thinly provisioned volume all from this new unified Operations Manager.

Revolutionary technology at evolutionary prices

Unifying the Operations Manager does come at a price, but Symantec has taken this in to consideration as well.  Symantec's Chandra Rangan, says, "Symantec Storage Foundation 6.0 introduces a new pricing model based on actual core usage." 

What this means in layman's terms is that an enterprise will only pay for the software it is using.  So as an enterprise's operational needs increase, it can upgrade or downgrade its software licensing accordingly. Operations Manager includes improvements to help manage the new software licenses and track inventory.

Symantec products are a great choice for resilient business services infrastructure as it addresses these three key business goals:

• Leverage your existing capital expense infrastructure

• High availability in an orchestrated manner for business applications

• Operate elastically, expand or contract your expenses like a Cloud

So while these are evolutionary in nature and were formally announced yesterday, on December 5^th, 2011, when Storage Foundation 6.0 is generally available, the revolution in your data center may begin.