Symantec Offers Virtualisation Solution

News Release

Symantec Offers Complete, Integrated Virtualisation Solution to Enable the Dynamic Data Centre Veritas Virtual Infrastructure to deliver enterprise class server virtualisation and advanced storage management

AUCKLAND – Symantec Vision 2008 –Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) 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 September quater of 2008, Veritas Virtual Infrastructure combines new, advanced storage management capabilities from Veritas Storage Foundation with the flexible, high-performance Citrix XenServer virtualisation technology from Citrix Systems. Veritas Virtual Infrastructure will allow users to fully benefit from server virtualisation while both preserving current best practices in storage management from the physical environment and leveraging new opportunities provided by virtualised environments.

Server virtualisation is transforming IT operations by reducing costs through higher resource utilisation and reducing risk through increased operational flexibility. However, server virtualisation makes storage management more complex and in many cases does not support capabilities available today in physical environments. Current x86 virtualisation solutions have tried to solve this problem using a file system-based approach, but this architecture forces users to give up many of the advanced storage management capabilities they rely on today.

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure solves this challenge by preserving all of the key storage management benefits enterprise customers rely on in their physical environments, but are not available in current file-system based virtualisation approaches, including:
• Direct control of block storage from a guest virtual server
• All block storage functionality including mirroring across heterogeneous arrays
• Proven, mature SAN multi-pathing to ensure data availability

Moreover, Veritas Virtual Infrastructure leverages the flexible, open architecture of Citrix XenServer to deliver new capabilities, including:
• Reduced storage costs by using common, shared boot images across multiple virtual servers
• Increased storage utilisation by simplifying the provisioning of additional storage, thereby reducing over-provisioning
• Increased control by empowering administrators with one tool to seamlessly manage both virtual servers and storage

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure uses a new distributed volume manager specifically designed to deliver advanced storage management capabilities for virtual servers. Unlike current approaches that prevent virtual servers from directly managing storage, Veritas Virtual Infrastructure uses a client/server architecture that establishes a unique, individual relationship between each virtual server and its underlying storage, just as if it were a physical server. Furthermore, because it leverages Storage Foundation, users can realise all of these benefits from their existing, heterogeneous SAN storage.

Enterprise customers are increasingly recognising the enhanced openness and scalability of the Citrix XenServer virtualisation platform. Including XenServer as an integral component of Veritas Virtual Infrastructure gives IT organisations an enterprise-class solution that dramatically simplifies the interaction between server virtualisation and storage management in an open and non-proprietary way. As a result, customers can accelerate their plans to deploy virtualisation across heterogeneous enterprise environments with the confidence that they have a robust and highly flexible solution upon which to build a dynamic data centre.

Symantec Virtualisation Strategy
Symantec is committed to enabling IT departments to fully capitalise on virtualisation, regardless of what platforms, architectures or systems they choose to use. In addition to working closely with Citrix, Symantec is also working with leading providers of virtualisation including HP, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, RedHat, Sun and VMware to ensure that users can leverage the Symantec solutions across these platforms. Recent examples of this include Veritas NetBackup’s Best of VMworld Gold Award for Data Protection and Veritas Cluster Server’s unique ability to provide application availability in VMware ESX3 environments. Symantec is committed to industry-leading data protection, systems management, storage management, high availability and security for virtualised environments.

Quotes
• “With Veritas Virtual Infrastructure, Symantec is delivering trusted, proven enterprise-class storage management to x86 virtual server environments,” said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president of Symantec’s Storage and Availability Management Group. “The integration of Veritas Storage Foundation with Citrix XenServer is a significant step to enable IT organisations to manage storage in their x86 virtual server environment with all the same capabilities of a physical environment. Additionally, we plan to extend our leading storage management capabilities to other virtual environments including Microsoft Hyper-V and Sun xVM.”
• “Citrix XenServer 4.1 takes virtualisation to the next level, with new capabilities that make it the only virtualisation infrastructure that provides users with an open hypervisor that doesn’t require users to re-architect their existing infrastructure,” said Peter Levine senior vice president and general manager, Virtualization and Management division at Citrix. “Veritas Virtual Infrastructure marks the convergence of our industry-leading solution with Symantec’s world-class storage management solution to deliver a complete x86 virtualisation solution for enterprise production environments.”
• “Delivering on the promise of the dynamic data centre requires robust server and storage virtualisation solutions,” said Bill Hilf, General Manager, Windows Server Marketing at Microsoft. “We continue to work closely with our partners, to develop storage solutions that complement the capabilities of Hyper-V. Symantec’s Veritas Virtual Infrastructure will help address customers’ needs for enterprise class virtualisation solutions.”
• “Server virtualisation is a transformative technology, but it has the potential to add to the operational complexity and risk by using unfamiliar technology and requiring disparate operational procedures and architectures,” said Gene Ruth, research analyst for Burton Group. “Leveraging the open source Xen-based hypervisor technology, and offering integrated solutions that meet the management and scalability demands of the heterogeneous enterprise production data centre smoothes and simplifies enterprise’s movement of virtual machines into production environments.”
• “As more enterprises begin to move virtualisation into production environments, they will experience challenges beyond managing physical and virtual resources,” said Noemi Greyzdorf, IDC Research Manager. “In order to reap the benefits of server virtualisation and drive down capital costs, enterprises need solutions like Veritas Virtual Infrastructure from Symantec to manage the overall architecture, storage resources, and operational processes to reduce complexity and increase efficiencies in managing physical and virtual environments.”
• “By standardising on Veritas Storage Foundation to manage the physical resources of our data centre including the storage volumes and file systems, we have saved significant costs and reduced complexity,” said Ignacio Vera, CIO, HSBC Mexico S.A. “As we look to server virtualisation as a way to improve utilisation rates, we’re excited about Veritas Virtual Infrastructure to provide enterprise class server virtualisation along with the same advanced storage management capabilities we rely on in the physical environment. Now we can leverage all the benefits of virtualisation and manage the entire server and storage environment from a single point of control.”
• “For years, IT organisations have come to rely on the Sun and Symantec relationship around delivering open, standards-based enterprise storage management solutions for Solaris environments,” said Steve Wilson, vice president, xVM, Sun Microsystems. “With the xVM family of virtualisation and management products, Sun and Symantec will expand our efforts and bring the flagship Veritas Storage Foundation product suite to Sun’s xVM virtualisation platform that enables Solaris, Windows and Linux guest operating systems.”
Multimedia Resources:
Product Tour:
Veritas Virtual Infrastructure
Podcasts:
• Symantec and Citrix Announce Veritas Virtual Infrastructure– Sean Derrington, director of Storage Management and High Availability, Symantec
Matt Fairbanks, vice president of Product Marketing, Citrix Systems
• Veritas Virtual Infrastructure Overview Sean Derrington, director of Storage Management and High Availability, Symantec
Industry Analyst Materials:
Analyst Reports:
• ESG – Critical Design Decisions: Server Virtualization and Networked Storage
• IDC – Storage Management Challenges When Deploying Server Virtualization
Analyst Review:
• ESG – Symantec Unveils Virtualization Plans: Launches Veritas Virtual Infrastructure
Additional Product Information:
• Veritas Virtual Infrastructure Data Sheet
• Symantec’s Storage and Availability Management Group Backgrounder

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