Symantec Expands Thin Provisioning, Partners on Clustered NAS

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Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) this week expanded its thin provisioning technology and partnered with Xiotech on a scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) system.

The thin optimization and reclamation features of Symantec’s Veritas Storage Foundation heterogeneous storage management software support Windows, Unix and Linux environments. Symantec claims it offers “the only technology on the market today that fully automates storage optimization in thin storage environments.”

Thomas Cornely, director of product management for Symantec’s storage and high availability group, said Symantec’s thin provisioning technology also goes beyond “zero page reclamation” to reclaim data storage capacity that was in use but is now free.

Symantec also announced that a number of storage networking vendors have added support for Symantec’s Thin Reclamation API, which enables automated space reclamation for thin provisioning storage arrays in heterogeneous environments. Compellent, EMC, Fujitsu, HP and NetApp have added support for the API on top of previously announced support from 3PAR, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and IBM.

Symantec’s File System Plans

Also this week, Symantec and Xiotech partnered on the ISE NAS solution, which combines Symantec’s FileStore file server with Xiotech ISE storage blades.

ISE NAS “allows businesses of any size to easily scale from an entry-level configuration to the highest-performance file serving applications, with industry-leading rack density and power savings,” the companies said.

Symantec’s storage and backup software business has been beset by reports and rumors of layoffs in recent weeks, but the company says it remains committed to its storage business.

A company spokesperson told Enterprise Storage Forum that some products may be combined, however. “The functionality of some of our solutions will be combined with others, but
that’s always the case as we constantly look for opportunities to integrate our offerings more and more,” the spokesperson said. “Throughout that process, we will devote the resources necessary to support those solutions on an ongoing basis.”

One product that will be merged into another is Symantec’s object file system, which has been under development but not yet released.

“We anticipate that the core technology will be incorporated into the FileStore platform later this year, as we mentioned at the time of the FileStore announcement,” the spokesperson said. “We are very excited about the ramifications of OFS technology to the industry. While working with beta customers on the technology, we discovered that the primary use case is cloud/REST workloads. We realized that our FileStore platform could handle REST workloads quite well. In many ways, FileStore is the ideal REST platform,” because of its scalability, features and performance.

“Thus, we have decided to make FileStore our core platform for all workloads and migrate key functionality, such as REST and multi-tenancy, onto FileStore,” the spokesperson said.

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Paul Shread
Paul Shread
eSecurity Editor Paul Shread has covered nearly every aspect of enterprise technology in his 20+ years in IT journalism, including an award-winning series on software-defined data centers. He wrote a column on small business technology for Time.com, and covered financial markets for 10 years, from the dot-com boom and bust to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. He holds a market analyst certification.

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