Symantec Updates Veritas Operations Manager and Storage Foundation HA

Symantec Corp. announced releases of Veritas Operations Manager and its Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability (SFHA)  product family to help customers work smarter by taking control of storage management and eliminating manual processes. New functionality in Veritas Operations Manager, the next generation management platform for Storage Foundation HA, bridges the gap between server, database and storage administrators to increase storage utilization, scale operations, maintain compliance and help ensure uptime and availability across Unix, Linux, Windows and VMware.

Automate and streamline operations
Today’s data center is more complex than ever. Data growth, coupled with new technologies and business changes, has resulted in many disparate tools, manual processes and a lack of visibility to interdependencies in the data center. The results are limited operational scalability, wasted resources and increased risk for administrators who are under increasing pressure to ensure 24/7 availability of mission critical applications.

Using the latest updates to Storage Foundation HA
and Veritas Operations Manager organizations can:

• Get centralized, end-to-end visibility. Veritas Operations Manager provides a set of built-in reports to automatically identify under-utilized storage resources, tracking utilization within database files and mapping that to disks and RAID groups in the storage arrays. It also allows system administrators to manage multiple clusters as well as disaster recovery configurations from a single pane of glass.
• Simplify and automate time-consuming, complex tasks. By creating automated jobs and scheduling of bulk operations, organizations can reduce manual processes including storage provisioning, online storage migrations and thin reclamation. Servers with thin provisioned storage require Storage Foundation’s Thin Reclamation capability to non-disruptively keep thin devices thin. With Veritas Operations Manager, optimizing thin storage across hundreds of servers is as easy as referencing a storage array, creating a thin reclamation job and scheduling it to run at set times.
• Automate start/stop of multi-tier applications. Today’s applications increasingly involve multiple services running on multiple server tiers: for example, a backend database on Unix, a middleware layer on Linux and a front-end on Windows in VMware. Storage Foundation HA and Veritas Operations Manager allow users to provide single push button start/stop of these multi-tier applications, ensuring components are always started in the right order without any risk of operator error.

Optimize existing storage investments
Data is growing at a rate of 62 percent annually, yet storage utilization itself often remains at or below 50 percent. Veritas Operations Manager gives administrators visibility into storage allocation, utilization and consumption – providing insight into how storage is being used.

Using the latest updates to Storage Foundation HA
and Veritas Operations Manager organizations can:

• Use storage smarter. With new insight capabilities organizations have increased visibility into storage allocation and utilization. Combined with tools to automate a tiered storage model, organizations can migrate less important data out of more expensive Tier one storage resources.
• Deploy thin provisioning with confidence. Administrators who are concerned about over allocating or under provisioning when deploying thin provisioning can leverage storage consumption trend reports to intelligently manage new storage.
• Hold users accountable for storage they consume. With integrated discovery, organizations can have new insight into data ownership allowing them to create effective chargeback solutions resulting in increased business unit and end user accountability.

Prevent downtime and instantly detect failures
According to Symantec’s 2009 Disaster Recovery Report, 40 percent of respondents reported that disaster recovery testing will impact their organization’s customers and nearly one third (27 percent) reported that such testing could impact their organization’s sales and revenue. Organizations see an increased need to instantly detect and recover failures as they occur, to proactively prevent downtime and to implement non-disruptive testing capabilities. In addition, there is a need for coordinating application configurations through different functional teams.

Using the latest updates to Storage Foundation HA
and Veritas Operations Manager organizations can:

• Detect failures and recover faster. Storage Foundation HA relies on OS based events to immediately react to resource failures. In addition to speeding up recovery, this removes the need to poll resources, reducing the amount of system resources used to monitor a system by up to 95 percent.
• Prevent downtime. With a built-in risk impact analysis, automated and non-disruptive HA/DR testing of physical and virtual environments, and new management capabilities, customers can have peace of mind that systems are in optimal condition and will failover or recover properly in the case of an event.

This new functionality not only helps organizations automate, optimize and protect, but enables IT professionals to reduce their organization’s storage costs while ensuring continuous availability of information and providing new visibility into – and control of – information stored. This is true for virtual, physical and cloud storage environments.

"Information is now the lifeblood of most enterprises, and organizations worldwide are going through a transition from the system centric world to an information centric world which requires new management, insight and optimization requirements," said Don Angspatt, vice president of product management, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec. "Organizations require new management tools and better understanding into the data contained in storage resources. These updates to Storage Foundation are designed to maximize the agility of our customers’ storage and server infrastructure."

"As organizations transform data centers to power their business, they are deploying new technologies to create consolidated and agile storage environments. Unfortunately, they are also faced with multiple management tools that don’t provide the required insight," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Symantec’s Storage Foundation is well positioned to help organizations transform and optimize their storage environments through increased visibility, management and automation, enabling customers to work more efficiently."

Availability
Veritas Operations Manager 3.1 and CommandCentral 5.2 are available. Veritas Storage Foundation HA 5.1 SP1 is planned to be available in calendar Q4, 2010. Customers who purchase Storage Foundation HA are entitled to Veritas Operations Manager at no additional charge.