Microsoft Hyper-V and Spin Marketing - Symantec's take

Microsoft's announcement of Hyper-V, as with other Microsoft announcement, brings out the spin-miesters in the marketing departments at Microsoft's partners and competitors alike. Over the past few days I've been posting a summary of some of the conversions I've been having about Hyper-V. This time, I spoke with Sean Derrington of Symantec.

Before we got into what Symantec thinks about Hyper-V, we spent a few moments on what Symantic is doing in another area. We discussed the annoucement of the Veritas Virtual Infrastructure at Citrix's recent event. Here's what Symantec says about that announcement:

Symantec Corp. today announced Veritas Virtual Infrastructure, the first solution to offer advanced storage capabilities for virtual server environments that effectively manage storage in large scale, x86 production environments. Expected to be available in the fall of 2008, Veritas Virtual Infrastructure combines new, advanced storage management capabilities from Veritas Storage Foundation with the flexible, high-performance Citrix XenServer virtualization technology from Citrix Systems. Veritas Virtual Infrastructure will allow users to fully benefit from server virtualization while both preserving current best practices in storage management from the physical environment and leveraging new opportunities provided by virtualized environments.

With that in the background, Sean and I went on to speak about what Symantec thinks about Microsoft's announcement.

I could summarize the whole conversation as follows. Symantec is focused on giving its customers a managable, secure and reliable environment. As that environment increasingly includes virtual machine technology, Symantec will support the virtual machine software tools its customers demand.

This means that Symantec intends to continue working with VMware, Citrix and now Microsoft to enfold their virtual machine technology in a complete environment of data protection, security and management tools.