Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation (SFHA)

Symantec Storage Foundation 6.0

The solution Veritas Storage Foundation helps customers to virtualize storage systems of different types, to create instant pictures (snapshot), to execute replication of the data belonging to the major applications and also to dynamically select and release resources in guest OS.

The product Veritas Storage Foundation is a complete solution Symantec for management of a diverse network attached storage. Veritas Volume Manager and Veritas File System founded on dominant technologies, it provides a standard set of the integrated means for centralized operation by the avalanche growth of amount of data, increase in return from investments into data storage devices, data protection and adaptations to the changing requirements of business.

In process of the exponential growth of needs for data storage of the IT company feel the need for implementation of new approach which will allow to manage flexibly an environment and to reduce costs, at the same time supporting the high level of data availability for crucial applications. Such approach means an opportunity to dynamically increase and reduce the capacity of storages, optimizing their work in real time, helping to select neobkhodimy types of storage systems from certain suppliers. In addition to it administrators of DWH should have access to the automated means of providing resources, statistics of use and reports on all data processing center within heterogeneous infrastructure of storage.

The Symantec Veritas SFHA 6.0 system is intended for control of data storage in the physical and virtual servers working under control of Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor. Instead of poll of under control servers when the central server of management regularly polls applications about existence of computing resources, necessary for work, the corporate technology under the name IMF (Intelligent Network Framework) is used now. This technology is already available in products of Symantec to UNIX-PLATFORMS, but for Windows Wednesdays it is offered for the first time.

Veritas Storage Foundation represents a product family, allowing to select the best storage systems for the current needs and to use expanded functions of disk arrays. In Storage Foundation 6.0 support of deduplication and data compression at the file system level is planned. In addition to support of thin provisioning technologies (thin reclamation),-level storage, dynamic scope change and rational data migration, Storage Foundation has the optimization for SAN of arrays which is the thought most over by a system. All these functions should work without access restriction on annexes to data, making the minimum impact on performance, thanks to automatic system of priority assignment of input-output between applications and service transactions. The products Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing, Veritas Cluster File System and Symantec VirtualStore supporting everything popular disk arrays and operating systems enter into the Veritas Storage Foundation family.

Main Functions

• Operational management of data storage with support of diverse operating systems (Solaris, Linux, HP-UX and AIX) and a broad set of data storage devices and arrays.
• Veritas Operations Manager provides centralized operation with diverse applications, servers and memory.
• Runtime allocation of input-output on several ways provides protection against failures and fast switching.
• The SmartTier function entering into Storage Foundation imperceptibly transfers data from one level of memory to another (A Fibre Channel, SATA, Solid State and other) taking into account their value.
• Centralized operation by volumes and file systems for the DB2, Oracle, Sybase and MySQL databases.
• Optimization of flexible resource allocation due to the rational and not interrupting system operation data transfer on flexible Wednesdays and the automated memory release.

Main features

• Increase in efficiency of use of resources for data storage in heterogeneous operating systems and arrays of storage devices.
• Increase in efficiency by means of evident representation and centralized operation by applications, servers and storage devices on different hosts.
• Performance improvement and readiness of ways of input-output of storage systems and effective distribution of input-output between several ways.
• Cutting of costs for data storage, simplification of data lifecycle management and performance management of the most important applications.
• Powerful tools of management, optimal performance and continued access to databases.
• The simplified memory management and providing resources of storage, increase in efficiency of use of memory, cost reduction and increase in productivity.

Except the changed scheme of control of resource availability, the Veritas SFHA 6.0 system also reduces the recovery time of servers and applications after failures at the expense of an exception of a number of especially long transactions connected with the connection of new servers to storage systems which is earlier connected to the failed server. Besides, now at recovery after failures scanning of disks in newly the connected storage system and import of groups of disks is not executed. Instead of all these transactions the method which the company Symantec calls "multinodal access to groups of disks" (multi-node disk group access) in which all server nodes in a cluster can constantly see the data warehouse so repeated connections and supplementary procedures become unnecessary is applied.

From other differences of the new version of Veritas SFHA 6.0 for Windows developers point to the automated end-to-end emergency recovery for virtual Windows Wednesdays based on Hyper-V and also technology of migration of Hyper-V Storage Live Migration storages which moves virtual resources of data storage on any node of a data processing center at the discretion of the operator. Representatives of Symantec compared this technology to the VMotion system of VMware company which provides transfer of virtual servers on other physical servers.

Specification: management of information storage

The scalable architecture provides a possibility of transition from the level of a local network to the level of a regional or global network without replacement of the solution