Symantec Now Protects SSDs

Symantec Corp. announced enhancements to Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server, the industry-leading heterogeneous storage management and high availability solutions for UNIX, Linux and Windows environments. This release enables organizations to capitalize on new storage technology, such as solid state drives (SSDs) and thin provisioning, while continuing to reduce costs and complexity through improved performance and scalability.

Additionally, near instantaneous recovery of applications is now possible with Veritas Cluster File System through tight integration with Oracle, Sybase and IBM DB2 –allowing for fast failover of structured information and near linear scalability.

“As organizations evolve to meet changing business needs, they require an optimized storage infrastructure that is dynamic and flexible,” said Josh Kahn, vice president of Product Management, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec. “With this launch, Symantec is providing customers with the ability to effectively utilize the latest storage innovations – from SSDs to thin provisioned hardware and even virtual environments including Hyper-V—while also providing capabilities needed to optimize any storage or server platform. Storage Foundation gives enterprises the complete solution they need to transform their data centers and enable business success.”

Solid state drive visibility
Symantec’s content-aware, dynamic storage tiering capabilities ensure organizations’ storage deployments remain cost-effective as they take advantage of new technologies that increase performance. This provides complete, coordinated server and storage visibility and policy based, non-disruptive information movement. Storage Foundation automatically optimizes heterogeneous storage environments, including those that contain both SSDs and traditional disk storage. Storage Foundation is the only storage management solution that can automatically discover SSD devices from leading array and server vendors and optimize data placement on SSD devices transparently.
 
Completing the thin provisioning ecosystem
The only cross platform, thin-friendly file system in the industry, Veritas File System enables improved storage utilization by integrating with the thin provisioning ecosystem. Announced last year, the Veritas Thin Reclamation API enables automated space reclamation for thin provisioning storage arrays and is now fully supported by Symantec partners IBM and 3PAR, with more hardware partners planning to follow suit. Storage Foundation is the only solution that discovers thin provisioned storage across heterogeneous vendors, while also enabling automated and online storage reclamation allowing organizations to stay thin over time.

“As organizations increasingly deploy thin storage arrays in order to improve storage utilization and drive operational efficiency, products implementing instant space reclamation such as IBM’s XIV Storage System and Veritas Storage Foundation are setting the standard for the storage industry to enable the on-line reclamation of storage that is no longer being used,” said Doug Balog, vice president, System Storage at IBM. "Storage reclamation provides a nice complement to IBM products such as Tivoli Storage Manager, which can archive aging or less used files, creating storage that can be reclaimed and then reused."

Storage Foundation’s SmartMove technology together with Veritas Volume Replicator makes it easy for enterprises to migrate from thick to thin storage over any distance. Only the storage that is being used by the application is moved, making data and array migrations fast and efficient even across wide areas. Storage Foundation now provides users with unprecedented visibility into legacy volumes and thin volumes, along with efficient central management and automated storage reclamation. With Storage Foundation for Windows, these capabilities are now extended to Hyper-V environments allowing organizations to better manage both their physical and virtual storage environments.

Storage aware application clustering
With this release, Symantec adds enhancements to Cluster File System and Cluster Server, providing improved availability of Oracle environments. In contrast to traditional failover approaches, which require both application and storage to move to an alternate server, Cluster File System and Cluster Server provide concurrent access to information and require only the application to be moved. As a result, organizations can now failover applications running single-instance Oracle or single-instance IBM DB2 in seconds. These enhancements create a more robust, manageable, scalable and highly available solution for critical application and database environments.

Green IT and Power Savings
With Storage Foundation the ability to accelerate the adoption and optimize the benefit of thin provisioning, tiered storage and solid state drives is realized, enabling the efficiency of storage utilization to be significantly improved. By both increasing the utilization of the most power efficient storage and facilitating the decommission of the most obsolete and power demanding storage, Storage Foundation can effectively eliminate electricity (KWh) otherwise needed to power unused or underutilized storage – which also reduces need for data center cooling and floor space. These reductions are readily attainable, and provide concrete, measurable benefit both from a cost and environmental impact reduction perspective.

As point of comparison, every 200 terabytes of tier one storage either reduced in the data center or not added by using storage management to control growth represents an annual electricity savings of $54,200 and a CO2 emissions reduction of 960,000 pounds. An annual 1KWh power consumption reduction approximately equals an annual reduction of 12,000 pounds of CO2.

Storage Assessment Service
Symantec also offers Symantec Storage Assessment Service to help organizations address their storage challenges and exploit the latest advances in storage optimization and management. With Symantec Storage Assessment Service, Symantec consultants assess the efficiency of a customer’s current storage environment and identify areas for cost savings. Symantec experts define the gap between best practices and the current environment, including people, processes, and technology, and assist in deployment of technologies such as Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server.

“Our customers widely recognize the benefits of thin provisioning to improve storage utilization, reduce costs and achieve green IT objectives," said Craig Nunes, vice president of worldwide marketing at 3PAR. "By automatically discovering vacant storage and alerting the array to reclaim it, Veritas Storage Foundation helps organizations move to a thin environment and remain thin over time.”

“More and more organizations are deploying thin provisioning to improve storage capacity utilization,” said Asim Zaheer, vice president, Corporate and Product Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems. “Hitachi storage systems and Symantec Storage Foundation now enable customers to not only migrate to a thin environment but continuously reclaim storage and ensure their environment remains optimized over time.”

“Storage optimization is a key component of today’s enterprise IT strategy,” said Bob Laliberte, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Symantec’s Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server solutions are aimed at addressing this issue by enabling organizations to tier, reclaim, migrate and manage storage for a more cost-effective and highly available environment.”

Pricing and Availability
Pricing for Veritas Storage Foundation starts at $695 per server. Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server are now generally available.