Veritas CommandCentral DR Advisor

Symantec Corp. announced Veritas CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor, a software management tool that transforms data center operations by increasing productivity, proactively identifying availability risks and lowering costs. Disaster Recovery Advisor furthers Symantec’s goal to help organizations efficiently secure and manage their information by expanding on Symantec’s market leading high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) capabilities to identify configuration vulnerabilities in any data center and ensure applications can be recovered in the event of an unplanned outage.

Disaster Recovery Advisor delivers value quickly with a comprehensive assessment available within two days of installation. This is made possible by an agentless architecture and zero configuration of its knowledgebase with more than 3000 risk signatures. Disaster Recovery Advisor provides a comprehensive assessment through in-depth visibility into the application, server and storage environment across all leading storage, server and software solutions.

Proactive Risk Identification Ensures Successful HA/DR
An August 2008 survey from Symantec found that more than 30 percent of disaster recovery tests fail as organizations remain susceptible to unknown configuration changes or ‘configuration drift.’ Successful disaster recovery requires end-to-end monitoring and reporting of application, server and storage configurations, and a flexible way to test HA/DR. With Disaster Recovery Advisor, Symantec is delivering a comprehensive solution to proactively identify hidden configuration risks which jeopardize the success of the businesses’ recovery.

"Our customers continually face the challenge of simplifying operations and cutting costs while ensuring the full recovery of their business in the event of a failure," said Yogesh Agrawal, vice president of Symantec’s CommandCentral Product Group. "In large scale data centers, proactively identifying configuration risks without disrupting the business is so difficult that most organizations don’t do it. With Disaster Recovery Advisor, IT organizations can automatically detect thousands of such issues, understand the risk to their applications, servers, and storage and take action while efficiently leveraging existing IT resources."

Two days to value with extensive knowledgebase
and agentless capabilities
Disaster Recovery Advisor has the industry’s most extensive knowledgebase of thousands of vulnerabilities and critical issues — nearly anything that may prevent a data center from recovering from an outage. This extensive knowledgebase enables customers to identify availability risks in their environment within two days of installation. Installation of Disaster Recovery Advisor is quick and seamless, as the solution is agentless and requires zero configuration.

The knowledgebase is continuously and automatically updated, to ensure that HA/DR plans will be successful and IT organizations will be protected from the latest HA/DR issues as they are identified. For any identified risks, Disaster Recovery Advisor automates the remediation process by providing resolution guides that help fix the problem before performing much needed DR tests, saving time and other resources.

"Veritas CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor will help organizations to quickly identify potential configuration issues," said Bob Laliberte, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Because the Disaster Recovery Advisor knowledgebase contains thousands of items and continually updates itself, customers won’t have to suffer from the latest issues that other data centers experience — it’s almost like an automated antivirus solution for data center DR environments."

Comprehensive Support
Enables Recovery and Cost Savings
As part of a successful HA/DR testing plan, Disaster Recovery Advisor supports the heterogeneous data center — server, storage and databases. It also supports the leading clustering and storage management solutions. Disaster Recovery Advisor supports all major operating systems as well as the major storage arrays and databases, allowing data center managers to have confidence that they can utilize it in any data center environment.

Disaster Recovery Advisor is the latest offering in Symantec’s storage and availability management portfolio and further delivers on Symantec’s goal to transform data center operations by increasing productivity, proactively identifying risks, and lowering costs. In an effort to help customers more efficiently secure and manage their information, Symantec recently announced Veritas Operations Services, an online services platform to identify hidden risks and drive productivity and availability.

Pricing and Availability
CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor is generally available with pricing starting at $3,000 based on the number of physical servers that are being monitored. Symantec is also offering a free risk assessment to help evaluate customers’ HA/DR preparedness.