Symantec: Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware

Symantec Corp. announced Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware to help organizations improve SAN storage input/output (I/O) performance and availability for VMware vSphere.

As customers move their business-critical applications to VMware cloud infrastructure, Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware addresses the need for increased I/O performance, better visibility and management of the underlying storage, and improved availability of virtual machines and applications in SAN environments. In the event of a path failure, it automatically routes data to an available path and then restores the failed paths as they become available – providing efficient storage management and availability across disparate storage hardware.

Thousands of customers have trusted Dynamic Multi-Pathing technology for more than a decade. Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware helps companies manage virtualized I/O paths through multiple algorithms and intelligent load balancing from inside the VMware cloud infrastructure. Additionally, it integrates with VMware vCenter Server or by command-line interface to provide administrative and monitoring capabilities within the VMware cloud infrastructure.

Symantec is also announcing an agreement with NetApp, Inc. to resell Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware, enabling organizations to get a comprehensive solution from NetApp as they build out their storage infrastructure.

With increased virtualization inside data centers, organizations have new demands that include higher performance and tighter SLAs for availability. Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware can provide comprehensive storage optimization capabilities to block-based SAN environments including automated priority based I/O scheduling. As the amount of virtualized storage increases – often consuming the same I/O path – conflicts may arise resulting in failed paths. Restoration of these paths can be challenging due to a lack of visibility into either the virtual environment or the physical SAN. The load-balancing and management capabilities of Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware can help improve I/O connectivity performance and reliability, while providing increased availability for organizations to meet business objectives of virtualizing business-critical applications.

Eliminating Storage Bottlenecks
for Virtualized Infrastructures
Ensuring optimal I/O performance in virtualized environments can be an ongoing challenge. Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware can enhance I/O performance by distributing I/O operations across all available paths according to default or administrator-specified load balancing policies.

Specifically, administrators can:

• Centralize management across disparate hardware to deploy and manage storage, gain visibility into SAN-attached VMware storage from the VMware cloud infrastructure, while maintaining resilient connectivity.
• Select between multiple policies depending on the characteristics of the I/O workload, SAN layout, and performance needs while keeping systems online.
• Distribute I/O across multiple paths for maximum performance.
• Increase storage hardware choices and eliminate vendor lock-in with array support including EMC, NetApp, IBM, Hitachi, and Fujitsu to reduce costs and achieve the performance and availability needed to virtualize applications.

Storage Visibility Enables Intelligent Decisions
Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware provides deeper visibility and reporting, allowing both the storage and server administrators to see key attributes inside the SAN. It allows administrators to make more informed decisions on storage placement of virtual machine guests and increase virtual to physical server density. For example, administrators can accelerate virtualization by ensuring the storage tier is appropriate for the virtual machine workload.

Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware helps organizations:

• Solve key challenges around device naming by using device specific identifiers in the device names, making them more meaningful and consistent, thereby reducing errors.
• Leverage VMware vCenter Server to gain visibility into the performance of the storage subsystem.
• Monitor the storage subsystem health from the VMware vCenter Server plug-in.
• Gain visibility during performance troubleshooting with real-time storage statistics.

Increased Data Availability with Proactive Failover
Data availability is crucial as more business-critical workloads move to virtualized environments. Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware automatically re-routes I/O requests to an alternate path in the case of an infrastructure component failure. When a failed path returns to service, it restores the original path configuration automatically, without administrator intervention.

As a result, Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware:

• Intelligently and proactively determines if a storage path is failing before I/O is sent down the path, providing maximum availability and performance.
• Provides fast failover and protection against storage path failure, including restoring of the path automatically.
• Reduces errors and increases efficiency with centralized storage path management.

"Storage is today’s key bottleneck for most virtualization and cloud projects. High cost, vendor lock-in, slow or inconsistent performance, complicated setup, and a lack of visibility are vital issues addressed by Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware," said Torsten Volk, senior analyst, Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. "Allowing the VMware administrator to manage storage from a graphical interface within vCenter facilitates easy debugging of performance and availability problems, and the selection of the most cost efficient storage tier for each application."

"Symantec and NetApp are long term partners with a history of delivering innovative solutions to solve customers’ most pressing data management challenges," said Chris Cummings, VP, product and solutions marketing, NetApp. "The combined strengths of NetApp storage and the new Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware software helps our mutual customers achieve improved efficiency, performance, simplified management, and increased application availability in VMware environments."

"We’ve worked closely with Symantec to deliver customers secure, scalable and cost-effective solutions for enhanced business agility in the cloud," said Parag Patel, VP, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. "As many customers are realizing the benefits of cloud computing and are virtualizing their business-critical applications, Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware will empower customers with a single tool to manage SAN connectivity."

"Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware gives organizations unparalleled visibility into their SAN from within VMware cloud infrastructure, helping them make better decisions and reduce configuration errors," said Don Angspatt, VP, product management, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec. "Now administrators can optimize SAN performance and efficiency and improve the resiliency and availability of their storage resources, freeing up the demands placed on them by poor storage and I/O performance."

Pricing and Availability
Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware is available through channel partners or from Symantec directly and will be available from NetApp this summer. Estimated pricing starts at $900 per processor. It is a stand-alone product for VMware vSphere through VMware’s Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) framework.