Symantec Corp. has made enhancements to Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server, which are heterogeneous storage management and high availability solutions for Unix, Linux and Windows environments. These latest releases are intended to help organizations to employ the latest storage innovations-from SSDs to thin provisioned hardware and virtual environments including Hyper-V. The new releases also provide capabilities needed to optimize any storage or server platform. Additionally, the vendor says near instantaneous recovery of applications is now possible with Veritas Cluster File System through tight integration with Sybase, Oracle and IBM DB2-enabling faster failover of structured information and near-linear scalability.
Symantec's content-aware, dynamic storage tiering capabilities help ensure organizations' storage deployments remain cost-effective as they take advantage of new technologies that increase performance. Storage Foundation automatically optimizes heterogeneous storage environments, including those that contain both SSDs and traditional disk storage. "You can't optimize your storage unless you know what type of a volume it is," Sean Derrington, director of storage management and high availability for Symantec, tells 5 Minute Briefing, explaining that now with Storage Foundation, "we can identify which volumes are solid state so customers can optimize where that data should be placed."
Veritas File System improves storage utilization by integrating with the thin provisioning ecosystem. The Veritas Thin Reclamation API, which enables automated space reclamation for thin provisioning storage arrays, is now fully supported by Symantec partners IBM, 3PAR and Hitachi Data Systems within their arrays and and other vendors will also soon be supporting the Veritas Thin Reclamation API, observes Derrington. According to Symantec, Storage Foundation is the only solution that discovers thin provisioned storage across heterogeneous vendors, while also enabling automated and online storage reclamation allowing organizations to stay thin over time. Additionally, Storage Foundation's SmartMove technology together with Veritas Volume Replicator makes it easy for enterprises to migrate from thick to thin storage over any distance.
With this release, Symantec adds enhancements to Cluster File System and Cluster Server, providing improved availability of Oracle environments. In contrast to traditional failover approaches, which require both application and storage to move to an alternate server, Cluster File System and Cluster Server provide concurrent access to information and require only the application to be moved. As a result, organizations can now failover applications running single-instance Sybase, single-instance Oracle, or single-instance IBM DB2, in seconds.
The enhanced solutions will help customers optimize their storage and how it is used, but also drive down their costs, Derrington notes. "There is the acquisition cost of storage itself and then there is the ongoing management cost." Many of the improvements in these solutions have a direct correlation to the amount of energy consumed to power the disk drives and consequently the power needed to cool the environment, he explains. "That dramatically decreases not only the carbon footprint but also the energy consumption."
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