Symantec Gives 30x Faster Failover to Microsoft Environments

Symantec Delivers 30x Faster Failover, Disaster Recovery and Storage Management for Microsoft Environments

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced new versions of the company’s storage management and high availability offerings for Microsoft environments, adding to the ability for organisations to enhance availability and storage utilisation in Windows Server physical, virtual, and private cloud environments. 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 organisations 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.

Read more detailed blog posts:
• Blog Post: Virtual Business Services: High Availability for Complex Applications
• Blog Post: Get the Private Cloud You Want

Fast failover of Windows applications
Plans for Veritas Storage Foundation HA 6.0 for Windows take a huge leap forward in minimising 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 instantly with asynchronous monitoring and notification instead of the traditional polling-based monitoring. Once the failure is detected, it optimises 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 dramatically improved – up 30 times faster than previous results. Organisations 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 an easy-to-configure framework for HA of custom applications.

Manage availability of business services end-to-end across heterogeneous platforms
Most business critical applications today 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 organisations 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 visualise 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 an important building block for ensuring resilience in private cloud environments by allowing organisations to define and manage SLAs at a business service level without worrying about individual components.

Automated disaster recovery and storage optimisation 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 localisation and DNS updates. This approach could ensure significantly faster recovery after a disaster event, while minimising the operational burden involved in the disaster recovery process.

Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0 for Windows is designed to provide comprehensive 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, organisations can seamlessly 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 advanced 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 a single pane of glass
Veritas Operations Manager (VOM) provides a single management console across physical and virtual servers that helps customers visualise, analyse and control business service availability and heterogeneous storage environments across data centres. IT organisations can provision storage using policy-based templates and implement chargeback based on real application storage utilisation with Veritas Operations Manager Advanced, enabling organisations 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, organisations can tie together existing assets – whether on physical or virtual systems, across OS and virtualisation platforms and with all major storage arrays – to enhance resiliency, scalability, and flexibility in their infrastructures. Symantec enables IT organisations to transform their existing infrastructure to get the benefits of a resilient private cloud.

Supporting Quotes
• “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 maximise Microsoft SQL Server availability.”

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About Storage and Availability Management from Symantec
Symantec helps organisations secure and manage their information-driven world with storage management, high availability/disaster recovery, email archiving and backup & recovery solutions.

About Symantec
Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organisations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. More information is available at www.symantec.com or by connecting with Symantec at: go.symantec.com/socialmedia.

ENDS

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