Symantec has introduced Veritas Operations Manager 5.0 and Veritas Operations Manager Advanced 5.0. Veritas Operations Manager provides a centralized management console that bridges the gap across servers and storage and enables organizations to get end to end visibility not just from the application to the storage spindles themselves but also in a heterogeneous environment.
The theme for Operations Manager 5.0 is to address the problem of the explosion of data volumes and the explosion of applications, helping organizations understand how their data is growing across physical, virtual, structured and unstructured environments, how applications are growing across virtual environments and then how to also remediate storage waste and minimize application availability risk, Don Angspatt, vice president of product management, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec Corp., tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Veritas Operations Manager provides a centralized management console that bridges the gap across servers and storage and enables organizations to get end to end visibility not just from the application to the storage spindles themselves but also in a heterogeneous environment, says Angspatt. “Heterogeneous can mean multiple OS platforms, multiple storage types but also across physical and virtual and even multiple virtual platforms – including VMware, Hyper-V, KVM,” he emphasizes. “Our view of the world is that centralized visibility is paramount for running operations better - for driving efficiencies, for driving cost savings, but also for driving a level of automation that is going to reduce the risk in managing your server and storage infrastructure.”
A key tenet of the Symantec approach is that the visibility is not just server side and not just storage side, that also has to include both, says Angspatt. “With Veritas Operations Manager, we are able to automate a lot of the complex tasks – both availability tasks or server-type things, or storage management tasks and we are able to provide proactive capabilities in terms of modeling storage savings. As an example, in Storage Foundation we have the ability to do compression and deduplication for primary storage at the file system level, and what Veritas Operations Manager 5.0 enables you to do is look at that ahead of time and forecast the amount of savings that can be obtained from compressing or deduping a set of data – what will be the impact, savings and footprint saved. That allows folks to think more practically about their data centers.”
Veritas Operations Manager 5.0 provides the ability to see how organizations are consuming storage and see whether they have waste and whether they have made mistakes in the past, says Angspatt. “Virtual machines are very easy to deploy and many times there can be virtual machine sprawl because of the low cost of deploying a new virtual machine; many times those are orphaned.” They are offline machines, but still consuming storage capacity and so being able to look at mistakes in the past and go out and forecast what storage utilization is going to look like, and how to plan storage purchases and savings based on prior actions, is meaningful to customers, explains Angspatt. Veritas Operations Manager 5.0 also includes performance monitoring and application availability dashboards with insight into issues that can impact performance and availability of critical applications.
The Advanced version is an add-on offering that provides additional capabilities for reporting, enables an enterprise-wide multi-site view, and also allows users to verify utilization for network attached storage as well. This is particularly relevant when you are trying to manage storage and availability across multiple sites, notes Angspatt.
For more information, go to www.symantec.com.