Symantec Reveals Plans for Microsoft Storage Management, High Availability

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Symantec Monday unveiled its plans for new versions of its storage management and high availability offerings for Microsoft environments that it boasted will deliver 30x faster failover, disaster recovery and storage management.

Symantec (NASDAQ:SYMC) announced that its new Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows—which will bring together Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0 for Windows and Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) 6.0 for Windows—is intended to help organizations improve availability and storage utilization in Windows Server environments, whether physical, virtual or in a private cloud. Symantec plans to make the offerings available in mid-December.

“Customers rely on Windows Server Hyper-V for crucial production workloads,” said Ian Carlson, group product manager for Private Cloud and Virtualization, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). “Just as in physical environments, recovering from local and site-wide disasters is critical. Veritas Storage Foundation HA 6.0 for Windows coordinates with Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster to extend availability of Windows Server Hyper-V virtual machines with capabilities such as online storage migration and automated disaster recovery.”

The new offering will boast an automated fast failover feature for Windows Server applications. It uses asynchronous monitoring and notification to detect failures instantly and then optimizes the failover time by eliminating steps related to making storage accessible on the failover target server, like scanning disks and importing disk groups. Symantec said this feature will allow customers to improve failover time by up to 30 percent faster than previous results, increasing the availability of business critical applications.

“As customers consolidate and scale up their mission critical Microsoft SQL Server databases or data warehouses, meeting their service-level uptime commitments becomes extremely challenging,” said Don Angspatt, vice president, Product Management, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec. “The fast failover and instantaneous fault detection capabilities provided in Veritas Storage Foundation HA 6.0 for windows help maximize Microsoft SQL Server availability.”

Symantec is also adding Virtual Business Service (VBS) capability to VCS 6.0 for Windows, which it said will allow administrators to visualize status, orchestrate the start/stop and recover entire multi-tier applications from local and site failures. VBS is intended to address resilience in private cloud environments, as it allows organizations to define and manage service-level agreements (SLAs) at a business level.

Symantec also plans to beef up VCS 6.0 for Windows with disaster recovery capability for Windows Server Hyper-V virtual machines, automating the end-to-end disaster recovery process in Windows Server Hyper-V environments. By coordinating the disaster recovery process for Windows Server Hyper-V virtual machines with Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering, Symantec hopes to automate the detection of site-wise failures and subsequent recovery steps, including storage replication control, virtual machine site localization and DNS updates.

Thor Olavsrud is a contributor to InternetNews.com, the network for technology professionals.

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