Symantec Spruces Up Storage Management

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Symantec made its latest move to keep pace with EMC in the storage management market, unveiling a new version of Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server 5.1 for Windows.

Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 High Availability for Windows, which will become available in June, will support Windows Server 2008 and offer more efficient operation, ease of use and availability and disaster recovery, centralized storage visibility and new “SmartMove” technology for efficient array migrations.

Aaron Aubrecht, senior director of product management for Symantec, said Storage Foundation for Windows and Cluster Server give users “a common set of easy-to-use tools that work across virtually every server and storage platform to provide online volume management, storage and application availability, application integrated quick recovery and storage area network path management.”

“We don’t have a hardware agenda,” said Symantec senior product marketing director Steve Wilkins. “We’ll give you one set of tools to work across your entire data center.”

“For a point release, this has some nice additions,” said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Bob Laliberte, citing better Microsoft support, more high availability and disaster recovery options, additional array support and greater efficiency and ease of use.

“SmartMove is a new feature that creates efficiencies in data movement by only moving the blocks of data that are really needed,” said Laliberte. “This should be beneficial for tasks like snapshots and thin provisioning arrays.”

The latest versions include expanded support for Windows Vista, Microsoft Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2007, Symantec Enterprise Vault 2007 and Blackberry Enterprise Server.

Dynamic Multi-pathing gives customers a single multi-pathing solution for a heterogeneous tiered storage infrastructure. In addition to the more than 40 array families already supported, Symantec has added support for Pillar, 3PAR and newer IBM and HDS arrays.

Storage Foundation for Windows also includes a wizard for quick recovery of Microsoft Exchange and other applications from a point-in-time volume copy, and Veritas Cluster Server has added support for EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF)/STAR for disaster recovery.

Veritas Storage Foundation Manager will support Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows and as many as 3,000 hosts, for insight into storage objects, including volumes, storage subsystems and storage area network paths. And Veritas Cluster Server Management Console has been enhanced to dynamically discover physical and virtual (such as VMware) clusters across Unix, Linux and Windows in a single global operation.

Configuration Checker helps identify configuration-related installation errors, departures from best practices, and incompatible hardware and/or software. SmartMove is a new feature in Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 for Windows that enhances the efficiency of data-intensive operations by analyzing the data and ensuring that only the necessary blocks of data are moved, improving efficiency of data movement operations such as creating or synchronizing mirrors or snapshots.

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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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