Seeing Things Symantec’s Way
Seeing Things Symantec’s Way
January 18, 2007: Building on the five year Storage Foundation heritage, Symantec has released version 5.0, built for a Microsoft Windows environment but capable of supporting Linux and UNIX also.
Symantec’s message is simplified storage management, high availability and disaster recovery tools, which have been developed for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint Portal Server.
Symantec will also add support for Storage Foundation Management Server for a data centre infrastructure, enabling centralized management of application, server, and storage environments.
Paul Lancaster, Symantec spokesperson for Storage Foundation, says that in a tiered storage environment, typical of most data centres, “It enables a centralized view for the monitoring of tiered storage and clustered server environments.”
Targeting administration costs, version 5 offers a set of new configuration wizards which make storage, cluster, and faster replication easier and minimises set up times. Administrators can also use a GUI interface to automate point-in-time copies.
According to Lancaster, the three top enhancements of version 5.0 are its centralized visibility and reporting functionality, performance and data protection. The four key components of Storage Foundation at a data protection level are volume management, replicating, point-in-time ‘flash map’ and clustering.
Lancaster says, “Microsoft has always used Symantec for hierarchical storage management. A bigger feature is our work on virtualization with VMWare or Microsoft’s virtual server. At the moment we support Vista as a client only for work on a server level.”