21Mar2008 - This week Symantec announced new versions of its storage management and high availability solutions that support Windows Server 2008. Steve Wilkins, Sr. Manager, Product Marketing, talks about what this announcement means to Symantec.
Q. What is Symantec announcing?
We announced new versions of Veritas Storage Foundation and Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows that enable our customers to manage multi-vendor storage without disruption to users or applications. We enable organizations to reduce costs, lower risk, and have the same confidence and manageability deploying applications on the Windows Server platform as they would have deploying on more robust enterprise-class platforms.
Q. Why is Symantec supporting Windows?
Support for the new Windows Server 2008 reflects the fact that Microsoft is pushing up into the data center and that mission critical applications are increasingly being run on the Windows Server platform – the most obvious being Exchange.
Q. What's unique about the new products?
Storage Foundation for Windows allows data center admins to manage the islands of storage across a variety of vendors, given the heterogeneity of most data centers. We are trying to provide a standard set of tools so admins aren't restricted to working only on familiar products.
Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows integrates Veritas Cluster Server, protecting the application as well as the data across local, metropolitan, and wide-area distances, be it for a cross-country or globally-based organization. In the event of a fault, the application is moved to another available server, physical or virtual. As far as the user is concerned, the application just keeps running.
Storage Foundation for Windows also provides support for the high-end stuff in the data center – such as EMC SRDF/Star which is used for multi-site replication and disaster recovery.
Q. What else is new in this release?
Besides support for Windows Server 2008, version 5.1 also extends support to the Vista client, Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1, SharePoint Portal Server 2007, Blackberry Enterprise Server, as well as compatibility with new storage arrays from third-party vendors.
Among the new feature enhancements, SmartMove dramatically reduces the time it takes to bring the new array online by copying only the relevant data blocks, and not the white space; 3-pass and 7-pass volume shred provides confidence that sensitive data is securely deleted before retiring or repurposing a disk array; and enhanced Fire Drill makes it even easier to test disaster recovery plans without taking down applications.
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“For a point release, this has some nice additions - better Microsoft support, more high availability and disaster recovery options, additional array support and greater efficiency and ease of use.”
— Enterprise Strategy Group Analyst Bob Laliberte
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Q. How are we doing on ease of use?
One of the issues for our customers, as Windows Server moves up into the data center, is that administrators are encountering far more complexity than they have in the past. Our job is to mask that complexity as much as possible and remove the opportunity for manual errors. The Configuration Checker does automatic checks against our compatibility lists, the new wizards help set up campus clusters, DR configurations, and Enterprise Vault, and Storage Foundation Manager provides single-pane-of-glass visibility and reporting.
With all these new features and capabilities, storage administrators could be seeing a whole lot more of their friends and families!
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