Symantec’s decision to offer hardware as well as software is generating a lot of buzz among both customers and storage providers alike. But what is getting overlooked is that in order for Symantec to succeed and gain mind share in today’s Windows environments, it needs to do more than just offer a hardware/software bundle; Symantec needs to become more Windows friendly in general. That is exactly what Symantec accomplishes by not just adding hardware to its portfolio but adding support for clustered CIFS and tightening its integration with Enterprise Vault in its FileStore v5.6 release.
Symantec’s decision to become a hardware vendor has far less to do with it wanting to compete with hardware vendors and much more to do with Symantec seeking to become more appealing to those organizations that are predominantly Windows shops.
In these shops, IT administrators are often IT generalists who do not have the time and expertise to spend days or weeks procuring software and hardware and then configuring it for deployment in their environment. They need appliances with the features they want that they can deploy into their environments now.
Yet this mindset is almost diametrically opposed to how Symantec has historically operated. Whenever Symantec would announce new features in its software, it could take months for these features to find their way into production. Part of the reason for this lag time had to do with Symantec’s need to first certify various vendors’ hardware platforms on Symantec’s software before the software could be put into production use in customer accounts.
Symantec’s decision to sell hardware changes that. Since customers can now purchase bundled hardware/software solutions directly from Symantec, the time frame between when new features are available in Symantec’s software and when they can be deployed into production and are ready for use in customer environments is shorter simply because customers can buy the complete solution from Symantec.
This mindset should also help to put existing Symantec customers at ease who may want to continue to take advantage of Symantec’s heterogeneous approach to storage management . These bundled hardware/software offerings seem to, at least initially, take on a Windows bent. Further, Symantec has indicated that it does NOT intend to partner exclusively with just one hardware provider to offer these bundled hardware/software solutions and will be announcing more of these alliances in the future.
It appears Symantec’s intent is to partner with a number of hardware vendors so customers will continue to have a choice of hardware platforms that are certified and work with Symantec software. But by offering bundled hardware solutions like the FileStore N8300, it addresses one of the current concerns that Windows shops have in terms of Symantec offering a turnkey solution.
However as Symantec looks to go into these Windows shops leading with the FileStore N8300 appliance, it had to make enhancements to the FileStore software as well. While these shops are looking for scale-out NAS solutions, Windows shops have specific needs for automated data management and simple integration with their environment. It is these other needs that Symantec was looking to address with some of the new features that it introduced into FileStore v5.6:
- CIFS is now fully clustered. FileStore has for sometime supported both CIFS and NFS functionality but with the release of FileStore v5.6, FileStore nodes can now run CIFS in a fully clustered configuration. Now organizations can use CIFS and serve any file off any node without needing to divide up shares and directories between different nodes.
- Simplified deployment in large Windows Active Directory (AD) environments. If FileStore is deployed into an existing AD environment with multiple AD domains and the AD domain has existing trust relationships with other AD domains, users from these other AD domains can seamlessly access data residing on FileStore.
- Wizard driven interface to configure CIFS. FileStore uses SAMBA to provide its CIFS capabilities and, while SAMBA can do just about anything that native Windows CIFS can do, one of the historical challenges associated with managing SAMBA is easily setting it up and then optimizing it for performance. To address that and make SAMBA more appealing to Windows shops, Symantec has added a number of configuration tools and wizards to FileStore v5.6 so Windows administrators will find it almost as easy or as easy to setup as a Windows system.
- File archiving and retention. In addition to a NetBackup 7.0 SAN client, the FileStore N8300 appliance can act as a storage target for Enterprise Vault. Beginning with FileStore v5.6, FileStore enhances its integration with Enterprise Vault with Data Archiving and Retention (DAR) to create a WORM-enabled file system. Organizations can now archive emails and files to the FileStore N8300 appliance and then, using Enterprise Vault in conjunction with DAR, set retention policies on the data. Data can then be edited and/or deleted only when retention policies are satisfied.
Symantec also expects FileStore’s integration with Enterprise Vault to continue to grow. Already FileStore lets Enterprise Vault know when it has completed a replication job of archived data that Enterprise Vault may delete that data off of the production storage.
Symantec is not abandoning its heterogeneous storage roots. Rather Symantec is recognizing that it needs to take a two-pronged approach to satisfying the new demands of today’s rapidly changing data centers.
Part of that means it needs to adhere to its traditional philosophy of managing any type of storage. But it also now means that it needs to adapt to the growth of unstructured data in Windows environments who are demanding faster, simpler deployments of the solutions they purchase. This has led Symantec to doing more than just making hardware a part of its portfolio; it has driven Symantec to give an even higher priority to integrating and supporting Windows environments in its FileStore software with features such as clustered CIFS and automated file archiving and retention in order to satisfy this new breed of customer.