Leading storage vendors have recently added support for Symantec's industry standard Thin Reclamation AP, Symantec announced. The Symantec Thin Reclamation API enables automated space reclamation for thin-provisioning storage arrays, and is now supported by Symantec partners Compellent, EMC, Fujitsu, HP and NetApp, in addition to previously announced support from 3PAR, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM.
Recent enhancements to Veritas Storage Foundation are intended to enable customers to simplify their storage management and more efficiently leverage existing resources to reduce costs and complexity in their data centers. Storage Foundation's thin-optimization functionality supports Windows, Unix and Linux environments and automates storage optimization in thin storage environments - to eliminate storage waste and ensure that customers only have as much physical storage allocated to their hosts as required to support real application data.
"The real objective for us and our hardware vendors is to help customers improve storage utilization and reduce ongoing storage costs," Dan Lamorena, senior manager in Symantec's Storage and High Availability Group, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The goal is to provide a range of capabilities to customers, including the ability to use thin provisioning, which has emerged as a hot technology in the storage sector. Thin provisioning is a storage array-based technology to efficiently provision storage on demand to applications, and maximize storage utilization. Describing thin provisioning as "just-in-time provisioning," Lamorena explains that it enables customers at any given time to adjust the amount of storage that they want to allocate to a particular database or application.
Symantec's thin optimization technology leverages host-specific intelligence and standards-based storage hardware integration to provide storage professionals with automated, granular, online reclamation of unused storage over time in a way that is transparent to the application, server and storage, ensuring arrays stay thin. Combined with Veritas File System, Symantec's cross-platform, thin-friendly file system, organizations can gain the full benefit of thin provisioned storage, including optimizing migrations and enabling storage reclamation. In addition, Storage Foundation discovers thin provisioned storage across heterogeneous vendors, while also enabling automated and online storage reclamation.
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