Symantec Transforms Data Center Automation

News Release

Symantec Transforms Data Center Automation with New Capabilities in
Veritas Server Foundation

With Addition of Veritas Application Director and Veritas Patch Manager, Symantec Offers the Industry’s Most Comprehensive Data Center Automation Solution

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced major new capabilities within its Veritas Server Foundation product family to transform the emerging field of Data Center Automation (DCA). The release of Veritas Application Director brings to Veritas Server Foundation the industry’s only solution to enable IT to control when and where multi-tiered applications run across heterogeneous physical and virtual environments to maximise server utilisation and application availability. Symantec also announced Veritas Patch Manager, which adds patch management and patch distribution functionality to the existing operating system and application provisioning capabilities of Veritas Server Foundation.

Symantec Vision for Comprehensive Data Center Automation

To manage the growing complexity of their data centres, enterprises require more than the automation of existing server administration tasks that traditional DCA products provide. Many enterprises have adopted large-scale shared architectures running complex multi-tier applications across a broad, distributed collection of physical and virtual servers, accessing terabytes of shared storage. If enterprises are to keep up with the relentless growth in demand for data centre services while keeping costs under control, they need a comprehensive and automated way to control applications, virtual machines, servers and storage. Symantec is the only provider of an integrated infrastructure software solution that delivers industry-leading capabilities in backup, storage management, server management and application performance management across a heterogeneous data centre, and as a result, is uniquely positioned to deliver the kind of comprehensive DCA solution that enterprises require.

“At British Telecom, we aim to provide our customers with true on-demand IT services and our applications and information must be highly available,” said Ray Griffith, British Telecom. “As IT complexity continues to increase at an alarming rate, a flexible data centre infrastructure that allows us to effectively prioritise customer needs is necessary for delivering on our application service level agreements. Symantec’s Server Foundation, featuring the centralised, policy-based management capabilities of Veritas Application Director (VAD) will help large global organisations like BT maximise the availability of critical applications and more effectively respond to the needs of our business.”

To master the growing complexity of today’s data centres, enterprises require a comprehensive DCA solution that addresses all the core elements of data centre infrastructure, including storage, physical and virtual servers and networks.

“Symantec offers the only DCA solution that provides active management across all tiers in the infrastructure,” said Kris Hagerman, group president of Symantec’s Data Center Management Group. “Our DCA solution is built from the ground up to be an integral part of Symantec’s Data Center Foundation, the industry’s only solution that enables enterprises to standardise on a single layer of infrastructure software that supports all major application, database, server and storage platforms.”

Veritas Application Director Automates Management of Complex Application Environments

Application Director is the industry’s only solution that enables IT operators to monitor and start and stop complex applications across hundreds or even thousands of physical or virtual servers, across every major operating system, in a secure, error-proof way. Application Director enables customers to define an application’s run-time requirements, such as its CPU and memory needs, network and storage connectivity, dependencies across internal application components and tiers and its business priority. Users can then create and enforce policies based on those requirements to control when and where applications run across heterogeneous physical and virtual environments enabling them to maximise server utilisation, increase application availability and flexibly respond to changes in application workloads.

Application Director also provides a more granular level of visibility and control for virtualised environments by monitoring the applications within the virtual server, the virtual server itself and the underlying hardware, as well as enabling the user to start, stop and migrate the applications and the virtual servers across hosts. Application Director currently supports Solaris Zones from Sun, VMware ESX server from EMC and AIX Micro-partitions from IBM. Symantec plans to aggressively extend this coverage to support all major virtual machine platforms across all major operating systems.

“As data centre management becomes more complex, IT managers struggle to find the right tools to automate business system administration,” said Donna Scott, vice president and distinguished analyst of Gartner, Inc. “Enterprises need a consolidated approach that provides both visibility into their health and control for start, stop and failover.”

Veritas Patch Manager Simplifies System Updates

Further enhancing its Server Foundation suite, Symantec has also released Patch Manager, which provides a centralised approach to patch servers and applications across operating systems. It automatically performs scanning and assessment, examining the current patch footprint in each application or OS and comparing it to available patches using policy-based rules to automatically manage updates. In addition, Patch Manager includes pre-release testing, patch repository management and automatic patch distribution with deployment, rollback and failed patch recovery. Patch Manager simplifies patch administration across the enterprise, enabling substantial savings in time and money compared to manual or semi-automated patch management.

Symantec Updates Veritas Configuration Manager and Veritas Provisioning Manager

Symantec also released upgrades to existing elements of its Server Foundation family, Configuration Manager and Provisioning Manager. Configuration Manager discovers all servers, applications, any complex dependencies among them, and tracks any changes in real-time. This enables customers to gain control over configuration changes to improve application availability and ensure configuration compliance to internal standards. Provisioning Manager automates the provisioning of operating systems, applications, and network personalisation settings to improve administrator productivity, reduce errors and improve server utilisation.

Price and Availability

Veritas Server Foundation from Symantec is available today. All Server Foundation components can be purchased separately or as part of a Server Foundation bundle.

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, California, Symantec has operations in more than 40 countries. More information is available at www.symantec.com.

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