Symantec Veritas Operations Manager 4.0 Available in FY2012

Symantec Corp. announced Veritas Operations Manager 4.0, a centralized management platform for Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server that automates manual tasks and monitors the health of IT resources.

The new functionality in Veritas Operations Manager 4.0 is expected to give IT professionals the ability to take action based on the results of its extensive reporting functionality. This will provide increased visibility and control to manage critical business services across virtual, physical and cloud environments.

The company also announced Veritas Operations Manager Advanced, which leverages Symantec’s experience in storage resource management, and in coordination with Veritas Operations Manager can deliver deep reporting for physical and virtual environments – providing the ability to take action and optimize servers and storage.

Functionality in Veritas Operations Manager Advanced can enable agentless deployment and maintenance, helping organizations to get up and running quickly. With planned faster and new reporting mechanisms in place, it will allow IT organizations to deliver storage as a service with on-host storage provisioning, policy-driven storage tiering and storage usage and chargeback reporting for multi-vendor storage environments.

Action-Based Storage and Availability Management
Unlike other management tools, Veritas Operations Manager is an action-based storage management tool. This can give organizations not only reporting and a better understanding of the underlying dependences of business services, but also the ability to take action from the centralized management console to control and optimize a data center’s storage and availability operations across heterogeneous environments. Using these methods, IT professionals can identify waste and take action to optimize their infrastructure.

Action-based storage management allows organizations to manage and reduce the risk of outages and facilitate business services. Organizations can allocate storage to servers based on business requirements, utilize thin storage capabilities, implement policy-based storage tiering, and manage multi-vendor storage chargeback reporting, all while getting a better understanding of the current state of their storage resources. It also automates the start and stop of multi-tiered applications running in physical and virtual environments to increase uptime and administrator efficiency.

Faster Agentless Installation and Reporting Capabilities
Most traditional storage resource management tools require software or agents to be installed on each storage resource to be managed. New technology in Veritas Operations Manager Advanced can facilitate the installation of the management software with agentless deployment, resulting in faster installation times, reduced management, and remote deployment options.

Veritas Operations Manager is expected to provide in-depth storage reporting for applications running in physical and virtual servers to optimize storage usage and performance. These reports identify unused storage and provide the ability and tools to reclaim it on demand, such as migrating to thin enabled storage or shrinking file systems. These reports enable organizations to drive down costs by giving them a better understanding of how they are using storage to improve utilization and make better purchasing decisions. Operators can monitor, manage and report on thousands of storage resources and hosts. Veritas Operations Manager can also minimize downtime with user-customized health checks, patch information, warning alerts and root cause analysis views.

Visibility and Control Across Virtual
and Physical Environments
In order to improve operations in today’s increasingly complex data center, Veritas Operations Manager can provide support across operating systems, server virtualization and physical server and storage platforms. This integration gives organizations a single tool that can be used across the infrastructure to centrally manage, provide visibility and take action in their storage environment, resulting in increased efficiencies and fewer errors. Veritas Operations Manager 4.0 can improve visibility into the underlying dependencies for applications running in virtual environments to reduce to risk of outages and provide the right information when taking action.

Storage as a Service    
Veritas Operations Manager 4.0 can help organizations take their next step in providing storage as a service. Organizations can deploy applications faster with an on-host storage provisioning service catalog. An application team can check off its storage requirements (e.g., Tier 1 storage using SSD and mirrored for data protection) from a service catalog, and Veritas Operations Manager can help administrator teams deliver that storage in an automated way. Veritas Operations Manager Advanced will provide granular information to set up storage chargeback reporting across multi-vendor storage environments, enabling metering functionality for the private cloud.

"Action-based storage management in Veritas Operations Manager is a game-changer, as it helps IT professionals get results so much faster than traditional resources across nearly any operating system, virtualization platform, the cloud and physical storage resources," said Don Angspatt, vice president of product management, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec. "With this release we’re focused on saving our customers time by simplifying and automating time-consuming complex tasks. In fact, we’ve seen installations as fast as ten minutes, allowing customers to automate storage and high availability operations, reduce manual processes and aid with storage provisioning, storage migrations and thin reclamation."   

"IT organizations need to provide access to storage resources for a growing range of IT environments, such as virtualized server and desktop pools, or rapidly growing collaboration and archiving pools. Managing and monitoring such diverse storage resources can be a headache for stretched IT staffs," said Richard Villars, vice president, Storage and IT Executive Strategies at IDC. "Solutions like Symantec’s Veritas Operations Manager will play an increasing role in helping organizations simplify control of storage assets, and also play a key role in helping safely and efficiently add cloud-based solutions."

Availability
Veritas Operations Manager 4.0 is expected to be available early FY12. Veritas Operations Manager Advanced is planned to be available in late FY12.