Symantec Storage Foundation

The Symantec company released in October, 2010 new versions of packets for systems management of data storage of Veritas Operations Manager 3.1 and Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability 5.1. The concept of "storage templates" or the service levels allowing to automate selection for applications of the corresponding type of data storage depending on requirements to performance and data security provision became one of innovations in this version. For example, for storage of e-mail which is not containing confidential information it is possible to set the "bronze" level of storage, and it will be stored on the disks SATA or network devices with reservation of RAID 6. "Gold" level will provide storage on solid-state disks with replication and reservation of RAID 10.^[1]

Selection of storage locations of data in the modern computer centers which are especially virtualized often requires handmade the administrator. The templates defined in Storage Foundation allow to describe a set of the services of storage available to use, and the rule which will be applied at each request of resources.

Storage Foundation 5.1 goes on sale in November.

New products of Symantec are designed to automate work of large data centers without increase in load of IT personnel. New management tools provide the maximum capacity and availability of storage systems due to increase in efficiency of operation and reduction of idle times. The packet of Veritas Operations Manager as the managing tool of new generation for Storage Foundation HA technology (High Availability is the increased readiness) provides the most close connection between administrators of servers, databases and DWH (storage systems). Thanks to the new technologies of Symantec inherited from developments of Veritas company, administrators of data centers can increase useful return from DWH, perform the most large-scale operations, provide full compliance with statutory requirements on data protection and maintain the maximum level of readiness for the applied Unix, Linux, Windows and VMware platforms.

The combination of Storage Foundation HA and Veritas Operations Manager technologies helps customers to achieve end-to-end control in storage systems. The packet of Veritas Operations Manager provides an exhaustive set of the built-in reports for automatic search of not used resources of DWH with a binding to disks and RAID groups in arrays of drives. Using this packet administrators can manage a set of clusters and carry out the emergency recovery of configurations from one console.

New technologies of Symantec facilitate and automate accomplishment of labor-consuming tasks, excepting manual selection of resources of DWH, operational migration of storage systems and regeneration of "thin storages" (thin reclamation). For maintenance of the compact size of "thin storages" which were selected to a server group in the Storage Foundation platform it is necessary to activate the Thin Reclamation function. Using a packet of Veritas Operations Manager the administrator can optimize work of such "thin storages" – for this purpose to specify group of drives enough, to create a regeneration task of "thin storages" and to appoint accomplishment of this task according to the schedule.

Also updated solutions of Symantec allow to automate such work as start and a stop of multilevel applications. Modern applications are used even more often by a large number of the servers working at the different service levels: for example, internal DBMS on Unix servers, the middleware on Linux servers and the part turned to end users on Windows virtual machines under control of hypervisors of VMware. The Storage Foundation HA technology and the management console of Veritas Operations Manager allow to create the uniform start-up/stop button for such multilevel applications so components will be always started in the correct order without risk of an error of the operator.

All buyers of the Storage Foundation HA platform have the right to the free license to a packet of Veritas Operations Manager.

2013: Storage Foundation 6.1

On December 24, 2013 the Symantec corporation announced the new version of the solution for management of data storage of Storage Foundation 6.1.

Description

The new version helps to use solid state drives (Solid State Drives, SSDs) in the data processing centers (DPC), giving the chance to clients to provide access to crucial data and applications four times faster in comparison with the traditional storage systems (SS). The solution provides advantages regardless of the used data storage equipment.

Growth of number of the crucial data and applications giving the chance to make decisions in real time leads universal implementation of SSD drives that allows to increase performance of modern DPCs. However similar solutions lacked a centralized system which would give to users the chance effectively to manage the data warehouses.

The solution of Symantec solves this problem, helping clients to combine SSD drives with already existing storage systems of DAS and SAN, without creating threats of reliability and availability.

Innovations

• The SmartIO technology implementing the special level of a cache. SmartIO identifies key these applications and caches on local SSD drives only the most demanded data that can provide a quadruple gain of performance in comparison with use of traditional storage systems.

• The Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) technology allows the server to get access to the remote data placed on other servers as though they were located in local storage and to create failsafe cluster architectures according to the scheme Shared-Nothing. It gives the chance to the organizations to reduce costs due to use of cheaper storage systems to 80%, providing at the same time reliable protection and availability of information.

Notes