Category: Symantec

Everyone hates to deal with clutter and perhaps nowhere is this truer than when it comes to managing data. Knowingly or otherwise, enterprises tend to sweep data management tasks under the proverbial rug since they rarely see its true cost or feel its impact. That perception changed significantly in 2012 as more organizations are starting to feel the sting of being unable to find the information they need simply because they have too much data in too many places to effectively search it.

Everyone anecdotally knows that solid state disks (SSDs) are fast – like really fast when compared to hard disk drives (HDDs). It is just that the number of proof points coming from independent sources that conclusively demonstrate their performance advantage have been in short supply. Now proof points appearing on the SPECsfs website are confirming what people already suspect to be true: the performance of SSD-based systems is smoking fast with off-the-shelf SSD-based storage systems leaving their enterprise counterparts in the dust.

It was just a few years ago that “mobile devices” and the “the cloud” were blips on corporate radar screens. Fast forward to today and those blips are fast taking shape as major forces for which enterprises must account. As this occurs, organizations need to re-think the steps they take to control and manage information sprawl going forward.

It is no secret that almost any enterprise with performance intensive applications wants to host them on flash memory storage sooner rather than later. Yet what precludes some enterprises from hosting these applications on flash memory storage are concerns about flash memory’s cost, application disruption and even how the data is protected once it is placed there. Using Symantec Storage Foundation in conjunction with flash memory solutions such as the Fusion ioDrive helps to put these concerns to rest.

Delivering high availability (HA) to applications classified as “business critical” in recent years has been as much a technical obstacle as a financial one that organizations have struggled to overcome. The latest version of Symantec’s Veritas Cluster Server addresses these concerns. Now any application running on either a physical or virtual machine may recover almost immediately to a virtual machine (VM) giving enterprises the high availability (HA) they have sought without the hardware costs or VM reboot wait times.

In the last few years VMware has added a number of features to its core vSphere platform to address organizational concerns about the availability and uptime of their virtualized applications, to include High Availability (HA), vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and vMotion. Yet there are still other aspects of delivering on the uptime requirements of mission critical applications that enterprises want that VMware does not offer. It is these gaps that Symantec’s upcoming release of Veritas Cluster Server fills.

The ramifications of organizations not getting data under control are significant. Recent analyst studies find that structured data stores may grow by as much as 60% annually and unstructured data stores by as much as 80% annually. Aggravating this situation, once all of this data is consolidated, the hardware costs associated with scaling the storage infrastructure to accommodate this data growth may be a factor of up to 10x of what it costs prior to consolidation.

The IT infrastructure that most enterprises want is pretty obvious: it is a private cloud. Less intuitive, however, is how enterprises will transition from simply hosting file, print and web servers in their private clouds today to hosting business critical applications tomorrow. Successfully navigating this transition requires that enterprises introduce a new set of proven technologies that deliver the agility and cost-savings that they have come to expect from private clouds with the availability, performance, manageability and visibility they need for their business critical applications and data.

As businesses and enterprises of all sizes adopt and implement virtualization and the cloud, they expect the future of their IT data centers to be much brighter in terms of driving down infrastructure costs while improving agility. Yet the global findings coming out of Symantec’s September 2012 State of the Data Center Survey suggest that complexity is doing more than surviving and thriving in today’s virtualized data centers. The promised benefits of virtualization and the cloud are failing to fully materialize.

Flash memory arrays have already earned a reputation as being the most highly performing and energy efficient storage systems available. However the level of trust that enterprises have in the storage management software on these arrays is still being built which results in enterprises being reluctant to use flash memory arrays for hosting anything but a few performance-intensive applications. By Violin Memory now integrating key Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation storage efficiency and storage management technologies into its flash memory arrays, enterprises get the performance and energy efficiencies they want with the proven software stability and reliability they need.