Symantec Enhances Veritas Storage Foundation

Symantec Corp. announced enhancements to Veritas Storage Foundation that enable customers to simplify their storage management and more efficiently leverage existing resources to reduce costs and complexity in their data centers.

Storage Foundation’s thin optimization functionality supports Windows, Unix and Linux environments and is the only technology on the market today that fully automates storage optimization in thin storage environments – eliminating storage waste and ensuring that customers only have as much physical storage allocated to their hosts as required to support real application data.

Symantec also announced that leading array vendors have recently added support for Symantec’s industry standard Thin Reclamation API. Announced last year, the Symantec Thin Reclamation API enables automated space reclamation for thin provisioning storage arrays in heterogeneous environments and is now supported by Symantec partners Compellent, EMC, Fujitsu, HP and NetApp, in addition to previously announced support from 3PAR, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM.

According to TheInfoPro‘s most recent Storage Study (Q4 2009), over a six-month period (from Q2 2009 to Q4 2009), thin provisioning became more than twice as likely to be a top initiative for Fortune 1000 storage professionals – moving it to the top of TheInfoPro’s Storage Management Technology Heat Index, which gauges the immediacy of user need and planned spending. Thin provisioning is a storage array-based technology to efficiently provision storage on demand to applications and maximize storage utilization. These efficiencies benefit organizations both from a cost and environmental impact reduction perspective.

Key Features

• Symantec’s thin optimization technology leverages host specific intelligence and standards based storage hardware integration to provide storage professionals with automated, granular, online reclamation of unused storage over time in a way that is transparent to the application, server and storage, ensuring arrays stay thin.
• Combined with Veritas File System, Symantec’s cross-platform, thin-friendly file system, organizations can realize the full benefit of thin provisioned storage, including optimizing migrations and enabling storage reclamation.
• In addition, Storage Foundation is the only solution that discovers thin provisioned storage across heterogeneous vendors, while also enabling automated and online storage reclamation allowing organizations to stay thin over time.

"With such broad support for the Thin Reclamation API, customers can have confidence in using any of the industry-leading thin storage arrays to deploy and manage their thin storage," said Josh Kahn, vice president of Product Management, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec. "When combined with Veritas Storage Foundation, customers can automatically reclaim storage while migrating to a thin environment and continually optimize their storage environment over time, helping to make thin provisioning one of the most strategic initiatives today."

"Using thin provisioning capabilities to both reclaim capacity and to minimize overall storage usage can easily save enterprise data centers hundreds of thousands of dollars or more each year, and as such these tools should be strongly considered by any organization that has not yet adopted them," said Mark Peters, Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Moreover, users can gain further benefit by seeking integrated, cross-platform management solutions that will help them with the migration and storage reclamation across their heterogeneous networks."

"3PAR’s thin technology leadership allows 3PAR Utility Storage customers to increase written capacity utilization by up to 75 percent or more," said Craig Nunes, vice president of Marketing for 3PAR. "3PAR’s support for Symantec’s Thin Reclamation API has extended this benefit even further by allowing granular, autonomic space reclamation to maintain optimal written capacity utilization with Veritas Storage Foundation by Symantec."

"As organizations adopt thin provisioning solutions to maximize storage utilization, integrating with their existing environment is critical," says Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing for Compellent. "Compellent’s Fluid Data storage capabilities paired with Symantec’s Veritas Storage Foundation enables customers to continuously reclaim disk drive space and ensures data is instantly available when the business needs it."

"More and more organizations are deploying thin provisioning to improve storage capacity utilization and reduce operational costs including power consumption," said Hitoshi Matsushima, Fujitsu senior vice president of Storage Systems Unit. "Pairing ETERNUS and Symantec’s Veritas Storage Foundation now enables customers to not only migrate to a cost effective thin environment but continuously reclaim storage and ensure their environment remains optimized over time."

"Thin provisioning delivers real tangible economic benefits for customers of all sizes," said Roberto Basilio, vice president, Storage Platforms Product Management, Hitachi Data Systems. "Now, joint Hitachi Data Systems and Veritas Storage Foundation customers can migrate to a thin environment and continuously reclaim storage to ensure their environment remains optimized over time, which directly translates to lower operational expenses and higher return on assets."

"Organizations are looking to improve storage utilization in their mission-critical environments by implementing solutions that can provision, pool and reassign storage capacity as needed," said Chris Powers, director, StorageWorks XP business unit, HP. "Together HP StorageWorks XP Disk Arrays and Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation’s thin provisioning functionalities enable clients to easily reclaim unused capacity across a heterogeneous IT environment to substantially improve overall storage utilization."