Enhancements to Veritas CommandCentral Storage

Symantec Corp. announced enhancements to Veritas CommandCentral, a storage optimization suite that helps organizations stop buying storage and reduce operational costs. Veritas CommandCentral Storage now includes new agentless capabilities which speed time-to-value — helping customers reduce storage capital costs by increasing storage utilization and control demand by mapping storage consumption to business applications. By gaining this critical insight, customers can typically stop purchasing storage for a year or more by utilizing existing storage assets while continuing to meet application service levels.

Veritas CommandCentral Storage Change Manager, a new addition to the CommandCentral family, is an agentless solution built on the proven CommandCentral platform. Complementing the capital cost savings of increased storage capacity delivered by CommandCentral Storage, Storage Change Manager lowers operational costs for enterprises by proactively managing change that can negatively impact application availability.

"With the introduction of storage change management and agentless functionality in CommandCentral, Symantec sets a new standard for storage management solutions in terms of comprehensiveness and ease of deployment," said Ronnie Altit, general manager of Data Centre Solutions at Dimension Data — a key Symantec partner. "CommandCentral is a central element of our storage optimization initiative to give customers an end-to-end view of their datacenter and help them reduce costs by increasing utilization and storage consolidation."

CommandCentral is the first complete storage optimization suite that integrates traditional storage resource management with storage change management functionality. Fully compliant with the industry standard SMI-S specification and deeply integrated through vendor APIs, CommandCentral has no hardware agenda and continues its industry leading scalability and support for heterogeneous physical/virtual server and storage environments including VMware ESX virtual environments. CommandCentral gives organizations a more comprehensive, cost-effective, and proactive alternative to using traditional tools such as element managers, point products, and spreadsheets, by providing centralized visibility and control over their storage environment.

Reduce Capital Costs
and Enable Rapid Return on Investment
The new agentless capabilities of CommandCentral help organizations realize quick return on their investment in areas such as storage capacity planning, change tracking and management, and reporting in physical and virtualized environments. By deploying CommandCentral, Symantec customers have saved as much as 10 percent of their IT capital budget by improving storage utilization levels up to 40 percent. The agentless architecture reduces deployment costs by providing faster and easier installation and controls ongoing maintenance costs by significantly simplifying solution upgrades. CommandCentral now also extends agentless capabilities to virtualized environments by providing application to storage spindle visibility in VMware environments, with no requirement to deploy Symantec software or agents on the ESX server.

"In today’s economic climate IT organizations must find new ways to save costs this quarter, as opposed to waiting for 12-24 months," said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president of Symantec’s Storage and Availability Management Group. "Symantec is providing clients with a powerful tool to achieve that objective, speeding time to value with agentless technology."

Reduce Operational Costs
Symantec’s Storage Change Manager is an agentless, enterprise ready solution that lowers operational costs for enterprises by enabling them to proactively manage changes that impact application availability. Storage Change Manager extends the CommandCentral family by providing a centralized solution for tracking storage infrastructure changes, managing the impact of changes, and enforcing policies and best practices for storage connectivity, configuration and compliance.

This new solution enables organizations to manage risk in an ever changing storage infrastructure by providing an easier way to manage storage area networks, identify storage configuration drifts, meet service level agreements and collaborate between storage and server teams.

Storage Change Manager enables organizations
to reduce their operational costs by:

• Providing a centralized, policy-driven approach to managing storage changes and configuration drifts.
• Minimizing application downtime by measuring the impact of infrastructure changes, and decreasing the time required to resolve problems.
• Benchmarking customers’ environments against industry best practices to identify hidden risks.
• Enabling collaboration between storage and server teams to troubleshoot issues.

"By integrating agentless storage change management and storage resource management capabilities into the CommandCentral platform, Symantec is arming customers with tools that can be rapidly deployed to combat the major challenges inherent in dynamic, high growth data centers," said Bob Laliberte, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "IT organizations can look to solutions like CommandCentral to proactively track and manage storage changes and provide insight into their physical and virtual environments so they can quickly reduce operational costs, maintain high levels of availability and eliminate unnecessary storage hardware purchases."

Pricing and Availability
Veritas CommandCentral 5.1 is available now with estimated pricing starting at $20,000 USD.