Veritas

3PAR and Symantec Announce Joint Development Project

October 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

3PAR, global provider of utility storage, is readying an announcement about a development project with Symantec to integrate 3PAR thin provisioning technology with Veritas Storage Foundation to allow granular, automated, non- disruptive space reclamation within the 3PAR storage array. 3PAR and Symantec have teamed together to bring to market an industry first—the automated use of filesystem-level intelligence to continually optimize storage utilization and deliver infrastructure automation.

The joint project between 3PAR and Symantec fosters development aimed at giving Storage Foundation the ability to track the mapping of block-level capacity to thin provisioned volumes on 3PAR InServ Storage Servers. This capability is intended to allow the Veritas File System within Storage Foundation to periodically communicate the location of free blocks to the 3PAR array as file deletions and changes happen within the filesystem. This partnership will enable 3PAR arrays to use this granular filesystem-level information to autonomically reclaim unused space within thinly provisioned virtual volumes, thus maintaining high capacity utilization without impacting host applications.

With this joint effort, 3PAR and Symantec have become the first vendors to announce the development of a granular, intelligent, and automated mechanism for reclaiming unused storage capacity based on the sharing of intelligence gathered at the filesystem level.

3PAR

Symantec Unveils Veritas Cluster Server One (VCS One)

October 8, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Symantec today introduced Veritas Cluster Server One (VCS One), a new high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) platform for next-generation data centers. VCS One moves beyond traditional clustering, enabling IT managers to implement advanced services including active/active DR, multi-tier business application HA and scale-out control — increasing uptime and decreasing capital (CAPEX) and operational costs (OPEX) for the business.

Traditional clustering solutions can be complex to deploy and manage for individual databases and applications. Yet next-generation data centers, with their need for virtualized, scalable and distributed environments, strain these traditional solutions past the breaking point. Next-generation data centers are leveraging server virtualization to create thousands of servers, demanding a massive increase in scalability. In addition, traditional clustering solutions complicate or even prevent the use of valuable virtualization features like live migration. Finally, maintaining only the availability of traditional back-end services such as databases is not enough. Instead, organizations require the availability of end-to-end business applications built on highly distributed, multi-tier application architectures.

Veritas Cluster Server One delivers a new, unique HA/DR architecture that not only directly addresses these issues, but also dramatically simplifies the deployment and ongoing management of HA/DR services. The VCS One architecture is client-server based and highly scalable, initially supporting up to 256 nodes per cluster. It is non-intrusive and outside the operating system kernel — facilitating deployment and upgrades. VCS One also has a simpler networking model and built-in resiliency against configuration changes that impact availability. VCS One is policy-driven, with priorities, scheduling and dependency management to automate tasks and increase operator efficiency. Finally, Veritas Cluster Server One has server virtualization abstraction and control to deliver a common HA/DR operating model across the various virtual platforms in an enterprise data center.

Veritas Cluster Server One provides high availability and disaster recovery for the next-generation data center with: One platform for virtual and physical environments; One platform for multi-tier and monolithic applications; and One platform for scale-out and scale-up control.

Veritas Cluster Server One is now generally available with estimated pricing starting at $995 per CPU.

Symantec Sets Up Virtualization Lab in Japan

July 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Symantec today announced that Symantec Japan has opened its new “Virtualisation Solutions Lab” for customers and partners, as the company continues to deliver on its virtualization strategy.

The Virtualisation Solutions Lab will enable Symantec Japan to test and optimize Symantec’s products for specific virtual environments quickly, and provide customers and partners with the opportunity to gain hands-on experience and see demonstrations of solution deployments for their environments. With this new facility, Symantec Japan claims it can better support its customers and partners who decide to implement virtualization solutions, as market needs for virtualization continue to grow rapidly.

The Virtualisation Solutions Lab is located within the Japan Engineering Center at Symantec Japan’s headquarters (Minato-ku, Tokyo), which is responsible for all technological verification required for Symantec’s products before their release into the Japanese market. With the launch of this new facility, the Virtualisation Solutions Lab will introduce comprehensive virtualisation solutions for data centres in VMware environments.

The line-up of solutions to be provided by the Virtualisation Solutions Lab is as follows:

Comprehensive backup solutions using Veritas NetBackup for VMware environments
Failover solutions with high availability of guest OS and VMware applications using Veritas Cluster Server
Backup and restore solutions for P2V (physical to virtual) system images using Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery
Deployment solutions for virtual servers using the Symantec Altiris platform

Symantec Japan plans to work closely with Citrix Systems and Microsoft to test virtualization solutions for Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments at the Virtualisation Solutions Lab in addition to VMware Infrastructure 3. In addition, Symantec Japan plans to organize regular product familiarization seminars as it continues to expand its range of solutions for its customers and partners.

[Source: ITWeb]

Symantec

Symantec Teams Up With Citrix, Enhances Veritas Virtual Infrastructure Suite

June 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Symantec has announced Veritas Virtual Infrastructure, which it claims to be the first solution to offer advanced storage capabilities for virtual server environments that effectively manage storage in large scale, x86 production environments.

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure combines storage management capabilities from Veritas Storage Foundation with Citrix XenServer technology. Veritas Virtual Infrastructure aims to preserve all of the key storage management benefits enterprise customers rely on in their physical environments, but are not available in current file-system based virtualization approaches.

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure uses a new distributed volume manager specifically designed to deliver advanced storage management capabilities for virtual servers. It uses a client/server architecture that establishes a unique, individual relationship between each virtual server and its underlying storage, just as if it were a physical server. Since it leverages Storage Foundation, Symantec claims its users can realize all of these benefits from their existing, heterogeneous SAN storage.

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure is expected to be available in the fall of 2008 with proposed pricing starting at $4,595 per 2 socket server.