Symantec launches comprehensive virtualization update

Symantec, a long time provider of storage virtualization and application availability products, launched quite a number of product updates. Including the following:

• Storage Foundation 6.0
• Cluster Server 6.0
• Cluster File System 6.0
• Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing 6.0
• Veritas Operations Manager 4.1
• Symantec ApplicationHA 6.0
• Symantec VirtualStore 6.0

The goal of this barrage was to provide a storage and application availability platform for physical, virtual and cloud-based systems that can include just about any storage hardware, virtual machine software (hypervisor), and management tools that allow an storage administrator to see very deeply into how storage is being used, who is using it and better understand usage trends.

Snapshot analysis

I've followed Symantec and Veritas for quite a number of years. It is clear that the company has delivered clustering, high availability technology, file systems and other virtualization technology designed for a heterogeneous world. The company is rather quiet, but has a long track record of success linking systems and workloads from many vendors into a single, highly available, highly manageable resource.

While the product capabilities for the processing virtualization and storage virtualization products are well established, the predictive analytics capabilities of the management tools does not live up to those offered by others. The tools are quite capable of finding and highlighting problems. The tools don't go on to analyze the operational data and suggest or implement improvements.

If your organization needs to link Windows, Linux and UNIX workloads and support them using a single storage platform, Symantec's products should be on your watch list.