New Versions of Veritas Storage Foundation and Cluster Server 5.1 for Windows by Symantec

Symantec Corp. announced Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server 5.1 for Windows, the industry leading heterogeneous storage management and high availability solution providing data and application availability for Windows environments. A key component of the Symantec Solutions for Windows portfolio scheduled to be available in June 2008, Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 High Availability for Windows introduces support for Windows Server 2008 and delivers significant improvements to operational effectiveness and ease of use including enhanced availability and disaster recovery, centralized storage visibility and SmartMove for efficient array migrations and thin provisioning.

“Customers today face overwhelming demands in managing disparate islands of storage and meeting strict service level agreements for high availability,” said Aaron Aubrecht, senior director of product management, Symantec. “Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows and Veritas Cluster Server provide organizations with a common set of easy-to-use tools that work across virtually every server and storage platform to provide online volume management, storage and application availability, application integrated quick recovery and storage area network path management. Enabling IT organizations to use a single software solution to manage their storage infrastructure and recover applications in the event of a local failure or disaster can significantly reduce both capital and operational costs, while simultaneously ensuring confidence that existing service level agreements are met.”

Expanded Operating System, Application and Storage Support
Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows and Veritas Cluster Server are extending support for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 Server Core environments, with support for Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter versions across x86, x64, and IA64 platforms. Additionally, this release provides expanded support for Windows Vista, Microsoft Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2007, Symantec Enterprise Vault 2007 and Blackberry Enterprise Server.

Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows Dynamic Multi-pathing continues to enhance support for leading storage platforms– enabling customers to have a single multi-pathing solution without compromising a heterogeneous tiered storage infrastructure. In addition to the 40+ array families already supported –support for Pillar, 3PAR, and newer IBM and HDS arrays has been added.

Enhanced Availability and Recoverability
Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows offers a guided, step-by-step, wizard to ensure Microsoft Exchange and other applications can be quickly recovered from a point-in-time volume copy. IT organizations can now simplify the storage management complexity of recovering consistent Exchange data to an alternate location with this new capability– automated snapshot recovery to Exchange Recovery Storage Groups. Moreover, for organizations requiring a multi-site disaster recovery infrastructure for Exchange or other applications, Veritas Cluster Server has added support for EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF)/STAR.

Improved Operations, Management, and Performance
Providing visibility across multiple hosts from a single, secure, web-based console can significantly reduce operational costs and risks to application downtime. Veritas Storage Foundation Manager will support Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows and up to 3,000 hosts enabling organizations to gain insight into storage objects including volumes, storage subsystems, and storage area network paths. Complementing the storage infrastructure visibility, Veritas Cluster Server Management Console has been enhanced to dynamically discover physical and virtual (e.g., VMware) clusters across Unix, Linux and Windows in a single global operation, and dramatically simplify operations. For example, clustered applications can be easily identified by geographical site or business unit, thereby making it easier to manage, act and report on the logical groups of Veritas Cluster Server deployments.

Configuration Checker mitigates risk to application downtime by providing a simple and powerful way for organizations to proactively and easily identify configuration-related installation errors, departures from best practices, and incompatible hardware and/or software. SmartMove is a new feature in Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 for Windows that greatly enhances the efficiency of data-intensive operations by analyzing the data and ensuring that only the necessary blocks of data are moved.  This significantly enhances the efficiency of data movement operations, such as creating or synchronizing mirrors or snapshots.

Symantec Corp.