Veritas Storage Foundation HA 6.0 for Windows

Symantec Corp. announced new versions of the company’s storage management and high availability offerings for Microsoft environments, adding to the ability for organizations to enhance availability and storage utilization in Windows Server physical, virtual, and private cloud environments.

In the event of failure of a mission critical application, Storage Foundation HA for Windows fails over the application stack, including associated directory, network and disk group resources.

Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows (comprising Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0 for Windows and Veritas Cluster Server 6.0 for Windows) is designed to help organizations rapidly failover Windows Server applications, recover Windows Server Hyper-V virtual machines from site-wide failures, and leverage their existing infrastructure to improve storage efficiency and application resilience in private cloud environments.

Fast failover of Windows applications
Plans for Veritas Storage Foundation HA 6.0 for Windows take a leap forward in minimizing planned or unplanned downtime with the automated fast failover feature for Windows Server applications. In the event of a fault, Storage Foundation HA 6.0 for Windows is designed to detect the failure with asynchronous monitoring and notification instead of the traditional polling-based monitoring. Once the failure is detected, it optimizes the failover time by eliminating steps related to making storage accessible on the failover target server; eliminated steps include scanning the disks and importing disk groups. As a result, failover time can be improved – up to 30 times faster than previous results. Organizations can increase the availability of their business critical applications with this feature. Veritas Cluster Server 6.0 for Windows is expected to have out-of-the-box support for leading applications and databases and also provides a framework for HA of custom applications.

Manage availability of business services
end-to-end across heterogeneous platforms
Most business critical applications are multi-tiered with web, application, middleware, and database layers sitting across multiple servers, across platforms, across physical and virtual environments and using different types of storage. Ensuring end-to-end availability of the business service is a challenge. IT organizations have to deal with this by using multiple tools, manual intervention, and coordination between different teams in the event of a downtime, whether planned or unplanned. With the introduction of its Virtual Business Service (VBS) capability, Veritas Cluster Server 6.0 for Windows is expected to provide continuous high availability of entire multi-tier business applications by encapsulating them as a single logical entity. Specifically, administrators can visualize status, orchestrate the start/stop, and recover entire multi-tier applications from local and site failures resulting in highly resilient business services. VBS is designed to provide a building block for ensuring resilience in private cloud environments by allowing organizations to define and manage SLAs at a business service level without worrying about individual components.

Automated disaster recovery and storage optimization
for Windows Server Hyper-V
Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) 6.0 for Windows is expected to add disaster recovery capability for Windows Server Hyper-V virtual machines. This feature will automate the end-to-end disaster recovery process in Windows Server Hyper-V environments. VCS 6.0 includes plans to coordinate the disaster recovery process for Windows Server Hyper-V virtual machines with Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster automating the detection of site-wide failures and subsequent recovery steps, including storage replication control, virtual machine site localization, and DNS updates. This approach could ensure faster recovery after a disaster event, while minimizing the operational burden involved in the disaster recovery process.

Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0 for Windows is designed to provide storage management, ensuring resilient and efficient use of storage infrastructure in Windows Server physical and Windows Server Hyper-V environments. With Storage Foundation for Windows, organizations can perform online storage migrations, including migrating to thin storage and non-disruptively moving application data or Windows Server Hyper-V virtual machines regardless of storage hardware. Storage Foundation 6.0 for Windows plans to support Windows Server Hyper-V live migration, while providing storage management functionality including automated thin provisioning/reclamation, mirroring, replication, and Dynamic Multi-Pathing from the Windows Server Hyper-V parent partition. Storage Foundation for Windows also includes plans to provide easy online storage management tasks, including capacity monitoring, auto-grow, volume shrink, and volume re-layout.

Intelligent reporting, remediation
and management from single pane of glass
Veritas Operations Manager (VOM) provides a single management console across physical and virtual servers that helps customers visualize, analyze, and control business service availability and heterogeneous storage environments across data centers. IT organizations can provision storage using policy-based templates and implement chargeback based on real application storage utilization with Veritas Operations Manager Advanced, enabling organizations to share the infrastructure across business units and track resources consumed by each.

Get the private cloud you want
from the infrastructure you’ve got
With the introduction of these solutions, organizations can tie together existing assets – whether on physical or virtual systems, across OS and virtualization platforms and with all major storage arrays – to enhance resiliency, scalability, and flexibility in their infrastructures. Symantec enables IT organizations to transform their existing infrastructure to get the benefits of a resilient private cloud.

"Customers rely on Windows Server Hyper-V for crucial production workloads. Just as in physical environments, recovering from local and site-wide disasters is critical," said Ian Carlson, Group Product Manager for Private Cloud and Virtualization, Microsoft Corporation. "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."

"Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows gives us a single view of our Windows environment and application health and status," said Saroj Yuttatri, Director, IT Operations and Services, Thai Airways. "It helps us to keep those applications available, better understand their dependencies, and start and stop multi-tiered applications and databases from a single console."

"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."