Symantec Helps Datacenters to Adopt SSDs

Symantec Corp. announced a new version of its Storage Foundation software, enabling data centers to leverage SSDs in ways that could allow customers to access mission critical data and applications 400% faster than traditional SANs.

It also provides these benefits regardless of which storage hardware components are in place. Customers as a result are free to choose any storage infrastructure provider, and businesses can make decisions faster.

The growth of mission-critical data and applications, supporting real-time decision-making, is driving SSD adoption to increase performance within the data center. Adoption however has lacked the central management intelligence that customers need to manage their storage efficiently and effectively. Symantec’s offering solves this problem while allowing customers to combine SSDs with existing DAS and SANs without compromising availability.

Storage Foundation 6.1 functionalities and benefits include:

• A vendor-agnostic intuitive caching layer, enabled by Symantec’s SmartIO technology. It detects critical application workloads and caches only the hot data on local SSDs, which could result in up to 400% improved performance over traditional secondary storage.
• Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) technology enables servers to access remote data as if it were from local storage. This allows organizations to reduce storage costs by up to 80% using commoditized storage hardware, while helping to ensure that all data is replicated, protected, and available.

“IT organizations are challenged to manage massive data growth and improve performance without increasing costs or complexity. Intel’s Data Center Family of SSDs complement Symantec’s latest Storage Foundation product to deliver fast, reliable and consistent performance that leverages existing infrastructures for easy deployment and greater cost-efficiency,” said Pete Hazen, director of marketing, non-volatile memory solutions group, Intel Corp.

“Symantec and NetApp are long term partners with a history of delivering innovative solutions to solve customers’ most pressing data management challenges. The combined strengths of NetApp storage and the new Storage Foundation 6.1 software helps our mutual customers ease the adoption of new storage technologies such as flash while improving efficiency, performance and simplified management of business critical applications like Oracle, SAP and Exchange,” said Joel Reich, SVP and GM, NetApp, Inc.

“The exponential growth of data is challenging datacenter architects supporting real-time business analytics. Adopting advanced distributed data processing technology enables enterprises to cope with this data growth and gain a competitive advantage by making critical business decisions in real time. The combination of Solid State Drives, Mellanox’s FDR 56Gb/s IB interconnect and Symantec Storage Foundation 6.1 eliminates IO bottlenecks and enables enterprises to achieve their business objectives over the most reliable data center infrastructure,” said Kevin Deierling, VP marketing, Mellanox Technologies, Ltd.

“Symantec’s latest offering is designed to help customers leverage the next generation of storage. In today’s information-centric world, businesses want both increased performance and cost savings — and it doesn’t make fiscal sense to rip and replace existing storage to deploy new technologies like flash. However, with Storage Foundation 6.1, customers can ease into the adoption of new technologies, while mixing and matching high-end solutions with traditional hardware, without sacrificing existing service levels,” said Ashish Nadkarni, research director, storage systems, IDC.