Symantec To Support Sun Fire X64 Systems

14 February 2006

Symantec To Support Sun Fire X64 Systems

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that it is broadening its support of Sun Microsystems technologies to include the Solaris™ 10 Operating System (OS) on the AMD Opteron™ processor-based Sun Fire™ systems with its VERITAS Storage Foundation, VERITAS Cluster Server and VERITAS NetBackup client solutions. This expanded support will enable Symantec to continue to deliver best-in-class data centre management and availability solutions on the Solaris 10 OS for any sized enterprise requiring affordable performance.

The expanded capabilities demonstrate Symantec and Sun’s ongoing commitment to help customers reduce complexity, improve utilisation and help ensure availability of business- and mission- critical information, while leveraging the compelling price and performance benefits of the Solaris 10 OS on Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers powered by AMD Opteron processors.

Both companies continue to heavily invest in engineering and testing focused on development of the new product offerings running on an expansive range of storage hardware. In addition, Sun and Symantec are collaborating on joint marketing and sales initiatives highlighting the benefits of the two companies’ solutions and the value they deliver to enterprise customers.

“This announcement is a significant milestone in the strategic collaboration between Symantec and Sun,” said Niall Wall, vice president of business development and alliances, Symantec. “Now customers can use Symantec’s market-leading storage management, availability and data protection solutions running Sun’s Solaris 10 OS on both x64 and SPARC platforms.”

Customers are looking to take advantage of the significant price/performance benefits of deploying the Solaris 10 OS on Sun’s x64 platforms. Symantec’s expanded portfolio of offerings address these needs and offers the following benefits:

- Ease of Management: Customers can leverage a single storage and server management infrastructure across Sun’s SPARC and x64 platforms that will provide consistent management tools for data center availability, storage management system administration.

- Cost Savings: Storage and server operational process remain unchanged, yet customers can take advantage of the cost saving, and price/performance, of Sun’s x64 platforms without compromising enterprise-level management.

- Seamless Migration and Flexibility: With VERITAS Storage Foundation, customers can seamlessly migrate to and from existing UNIX and Linux based systems to Solaris on AMD Opteron. Furthermore, they can migrate between heterogeneous storage hardware platforms, giving them complete flexibility and choice of server and storage platforms.

- Industry-Leading Functionality: IT organisations can utilise the same industry-leading storage management, availability and data protection solutions with Solaris 8, 9 and 10 operating systems while adding new capabilities specifically designed to take advantage of the latest innovations included in the Solaris 10 OS on x64 platforms.

“With Symantec’s support of the Solaris 10 OS on Sun Fire x64 servers, together we are bringing cost savings, seamless migration and flexibility and industry-leading functionality to a broader range of customers,” said Stephen Borcich, vice president of partner marketing, Sun Microsystems. “Sun’s long history of building innovative alliances with companies such as Symantec continues to be a driving force behind next-generation compute offerings.”

Storage Management and Data Centre Availability

VERITAS Storage Foundation software now offers support for many of the latest features and enhancements included in the Solaris 10 OS, such as Solaris Containers, DTrace and new security functionality with Process Rights Management and Solaris Secure Execution.

As part of a data center availability solution, VERITAS Cluster Server provides increased levels of data availability for applications, databases and servers as well as enhanced protection against downtime, whether planned or unplanned, over local, metropolitan or wide area distances. Moreover, VERITAS Cluster Server protects all Solaris environments and fully supports high availability solutions.

In the future, VERITAS Volume Replicator will fully support Solaris/Opteron platforms, giving customers the ability to replicate and recover critical data regardless of the type of application or database, including Oracle RAC databases, over any distance.
Pricing and Product Availability

Storage Foundation pricing will be by server tier and pricing will start at US$400.

About Symantec
Symantec is the world leader in providing solutions to help individuals and enterprises assure the security, availability and integrity of their information. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has operations in more than 40 countries. More information is available at www.symantec.com.

ENDS

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