On Oct. 4, storage management vendor Symantec is releasing version 6.0 of its Storage Foundation and Availability Management software portfolio, which offers new tools to create a private cloud without the need to rip and replace existing IT assets.
With Foundation 6.0, customers will be able to deliver business services to internal and external users end-to-end in a heterogeneous IT environment, deploy storage for cloud workloads, reduce storage footprints through deduplication and compression, and manage the system through a single management console for monitoring operations and fixing problems.
The company gave a preview of the new portfolio recently to select reporters and tech bloggers at its offices in Mountain View, Calif. Executives at the preview repeated the message, "Getting the private cloud you need from the infrastructure you’ve already got."
In addition to Storage Foundation 6.0, products in the portfolio will include Veritas Cluster Server 6.0, Veritas Operations Manager 4.1 and Symantec ApplicationHA 6.0, among others. Symantec, a legacy vendor of anti-virus and other security software, entered the storage management space with its $13.5 billion acquisition of Veritas Software in late 2004.
One feature of version 6.0 is its ability to deliver virtual business services simply and reliably, says Mike Reynolds, a senior product marketing manager at Symantec. In a traditional environment, a business service is delivered through a Web server tier, an application server tier and a database server. If the application server goes down, it can quickly be started up, but the problem isn’t fully solved there.
"The problem is you’ve got to not only recover that single node, you’ve got to reconnect it to the database and the Web server and that, today, takes manual intervention. That’s problematic, so we’ve automated that process such that we’re reducing downtime," Reynolds says.
