Symantec Hand to Hand With VMWare

Symantec Corp. announced technology developments designed to help customers more effectively deploy, protect and manage their applications and databases running in virtual environments.

Security, availability and data protection challenges have restrained many organizations from realizing the full benefits of virtualization for the applications that are critical to their businesses, including CRM, ERP and email. Symantec’s integrated solutions for security, high availability, endpoint management, storage management and backup and recovery enable customers of all sizes to benefit from virtualization, trusting that their business-critical applications are secure, available and recoverable in spite of the high demand placed upon them.

High Availability
Virtualization of business-critical applications has become mainstream, and many organizations are moving applications such as MS SQL, MS Exchange, Oracle databases, and SAP to virtual platforms. Virtualization provides simple and robust infrastructure availability, but until now has lacked solutions to protect applications inside virtual machines. Based on industry-leading Veritas Cluster Server technology, Symantec ApplicationHA integrates with VMware vCenter Server and VMware High Availability to ensure high availability for applications running in virtual machines. Symantec ApplicationHA complements VMware HA with application health monitoring and control. The recently announced ApplicationHA is the result of extensive collaboration between Symantec and VMware to help organizations accelerate the virtualization of business-critical applications while providing simple application-aware availability.

Storage Management
At VMworld 2010 Symantec is also unveiling Symantec VirtualStore, a new solution designed to minimize storage costs in VMware environments.

As organizations scale their virtual environments, they face increasing storage requirements and performance bottlenecks associated with retaining hundreds or even thousands of virtual machine images. Based on Veritas Storage Foundation technology, VirtualStore is a software-based NAS solution that scales servers and storage independently, efficiently provisions virtual machines, and delivers advanced storage optimization capabilities for VMware environments. VirtualStore was developed in collaboration with VMware and integrates with VMware’s management tools such as VMware vCenter Server and VMware vMotion.

Backup and Recovery
Applications handle an organization’s most important information, and regular, reliable and efficient backups are essential. But the backup process itself can’t interfere with the performance of the production application. Symantec NetBackup 7 provides streamlined protection across both physical and virtual environments, helping organizations reduce complexity, maximize operational efficiency, centralize administration and simplify recovery. NetBackup 7 natively integrates with the VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection, supports VMware vSphere 4.1, and delivers flexible, built-in virtual machine-optimized deduplication.

Symantec Backup Exec 2010 helps small and midsized organizations backup and restore an entire virtual machine or a granular data object from a single pass backup, reducing backup and recovery times and shrinking storage hardware requirements. Backup Exec 2010 includes new support for VMware vSphere 4.1 with block-level backups including incremental/differential support to reduce backup windows and storage costs. Data deduplication can also be applied to VMware client backups to further reduce and consolidate storage resources.

Security
Symantec is working closely with VMware to ensure Symantec security solutions work seamlessly in VMware deployments. Symantec security solutions are optimized for virtual environments and help harden servers, secure endpoints and enforce security policies.

Symantec Critical System Protection provides real-time hardening and intrusion monitoring while maintaining high performance and availability. It protects the VMware vSphere host and guest instances with layered controls. The resource utilization leveling technology in Symantec Endpoint Protection is crafted to ensure simultaneous scans and updates don’t impact performance of virtual hosts. The Symantec Protection Center centralizes security management, to manage, update and monitor security policies and configurations across both physical and virtual environments. Symantec Brightmail Gateway 9.0 is optimized for VMware vSphere and is certified as a VMware Ready Virtual Appliance, enabling customers to scale their messaging security infrastructure while taking advantage of the resource utilization benefits of virtualization.

Endpoint Virtualization and Management
Desktops and laptops, rich clients and thin clients, physical desktops and virtual desktops, shared systems and dedicated systems each have their place in today’s enterprise. With all of this disparity, manageability has become the next big challenge for IT. Symantec Endpoint Virtualization Suite turns this challenge into an opportunity with dynamic desktops and application provisioning, application conflict elimination, and proactive license compliance and optimization.

In addition, Symantec’s endpoint management solutions seamlessly manage VMware environments and maintain the stability of tier-one applications. Altiris Server Management Suite 7.0 from Symantec provides the essential capabilities to discover, provision, manage and monitor server infrastructures across a range of physical and virtual platforms, allowing IT administrators to increase the availability of applications and automate manual efforts to ensure a consistent, reliable and supportable IT environment.

"The broad and deep mainstream use of virtualization software makes the average virtualized server a mission critical server, simply because of the number of workloads and server OS instances that now depend on a single hardware platform. Customers need to treat these servers as mission critical servers, and support them with the right security, availability and backup solutions, appropriately protecting those critical systems. The use of virtualization software is dramatically changing the base requirements for infrastructure software deployments," said Al Gillen, program VP, System Software, at IDC.

"Today, server virtualization rates of 50 percent or more are increasingly common in well-run data centers. But a variety of service level challenges have kept most organizations from realizing the full benefits of virtualization for the applications that power their businesses. From data protection to storage management, high availability and disaster recovery to endpoint virtualization, Symantec software helps customers protect and manage their physical and virtual information and infrastructure, enabling them confidently virtualize even their most business-critical applications," said John Magee, vice president, Product Marketing, Symantec.

"VMware and Symantec have built a strong partnership, and it’s exciting to see the results of our collaboration, including improved management of virtual environments and increased levels of security and availability. Our joint customers look to us to help solve real-world problems through innovation, and we continue to work together to help customers progress on their journey to IT as a Service," said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware.