Enterprises have been hearing about the value and veracity of public
cloud for years even as Symantec has been getting feedback on its value
proposition from its public cloud customers. The message that Symantec has
received is that “ripping and replacing” is not an option. Rather enterprises want and need revolutionary
infrastructure with evolutionary products and prices.
In response to that Symantec yesterday formally unleashed a bevy of
products and functionality that converts public cloud capabilities into what
more enterprises want: private cloud realities. Symantec’s multi-product approach delivers a revolutionary
infrastructure for enterprises across the globe. To accomplish this, Symantec delivers
integration, efficiency and licensing improvements with its Storage Foundation
6.0 line up of products:
These seven products work like RADAR to help you
manage and navigate your way in to and through todays cloud based
infrastructures. Traditionally, products
like these were aligned in a marketing offering, but the technology afforded
little integration with each other. In
this Storage Foundation 6.0 release from Symantec, these seven products deliver
on three core revolutionary infrastructure themes that enterprise organizations
want:
- Maintain
resiliency
- Become
elastic and agile
- Pool
resources and meter
Symantec’s unique approach to delivering this
revolutionary infrastructure is rooted in its heightened focus on the capital
expense budget within enterprises and tailoring the Storage Foundation 6.0
lineup to work with existing data center infrastructures. Symantec has taken these three themes and
evolved them into business critical pillars for the private cloud. Symantec identifies three pillars as:
- Resilient Business Services. Resilient
business service is more than just language; it is holistic and orchestrated
approach to HA/DR across operating systems and virtual environments. To do so in Storage Foundation 6.0 Symantec
has integrated Veritas Operations Manager, Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) and Symantec
ApplicationHA to achieve this goal.
These products work in tandem to tie an entire business service from
server to storage, through to reporting.For
example, prior to the Storage Foundation 6.0 release, Symantec customers typically
had to architect HA/DR for a database and a web server separately as there was not
a way to pool these resources for monitoring and management.In
this release the products are tied together to present your business critical
infrastructure as a pool to make it more elastic and operate as a whole. VCS, working with ApplicationHA, figures out
if the error is in the web server, database or application/business rules. Once identified, the products orchestrate an
availability recovery that is both resilient and revolutionary.
- Resilient elastic storage. Symantec continues to
deliver on traditional storage features ranging from cluster file system to
thin provisioning. However storage and
data management technologies have evolved in recent years with storage deduplication
and compression taking some of the focus off of eliminating data.
In
response, Symantec focused on delivering deduplication and compression as a
core part of their resilient elastic storage so enterprises can create private
cloud that expand, reduce, deduplicate, compress, optimize and chargeback
across multiple vendor storage.Deduplication
can be enabled on a per-file-system basis and works by identifying duplicate
blocks. Once the duplicate blocks are
identified, they are mapped to the same inode.
In pre-release testing Symantec was able to deduplicate virtual machine
storage at a rate of 50% with the ability to achieve deduplication ratios of
upward of 80%.
Compression
can also be enabled on a per-file-system basis or specific files and/or
directories but also makes provisions to exclude certain file types that are
crucial for compression such as JPG, tar.gz, and ZIP filesTo
prevent compression and deduplication workloads from conflicting with
production workloads, Symantec took two important steps. First, it configured
them to operate as post process optimizations.
Second, it separated these optimization workloads from production
workloads.
Yet
what is arguably most valuable is that Symantec delivers these elastic storage capabilities
for your existing storage as well as any new storage you purchase. Utilizing their storage efficiency
technologies enterprises can minimize the need for future purchases plus
Symantec provides chargeback reports to justify the budget for these new
purchases and identify those who should help pay for it.
- Information to action. Resilient business services and elastic
storage generate a lot of information about whole systems and infrastructure operational
efficiency. To accommodate this data
growth Symantec extended its Veritas Operations Manager with Veritas Operations
Manager Advanced. The advanced version integrates
Operations Manager’s reporting capabilities with the remediation capabilities
of other Symantec products.
For example, say a volume is over
subscribed. In this release administrators
only need to do a left mouse click and chose from “Options.” Options include resizing, restore, snapshot,
mirror, etc and so they can execute a resize and convert it to a thinly
provisioned volume all from this new unified Operations Manager.
Revolutionary technology at
evolutionary prices
Unifying the Operations Manager does come at a price, but Symantec
has taken this in to consideration as well.
Symantec’s Chandra Rangan, says,
“Symantec Storage Foundation 6.0 introduces a new pricing model based on actual
core usage.“
What this means in layman’s terms is that an enterprise will only
pay for the software it is using. So as
an enterprise’s operational needs increase, it can upgrade or downgrade its
software licensing accordingly. Operations Manager includes improvements to
help manage the new software licenses and track inventory.
Symantec products are a great choice for resilient business
services infrastructure as it addresses these three key business goals:
- Leverage
your existing capital expense infrastructure
- High
availability in an orchestrated manner for business applications
- Operate elastically,
expand or contract your expenses like a Cloud
So while these are evolutionary in nature and were formally
announced yesterday, on December 5th, 2011, when Storage Foundation 6.0
is generally available, the revolution in your data center may begin.