Symantec bundles up Veritas family into datacentre offering

Symantec has bundled a number of Veritas products together to appeal the datacentre operation market, which it believes has growth problems.

The company has owned the Veritas family of storage and back-up products for 18 months now and has enhanced most of the product suite, as well as superimposing an integration layer on it, providing standardised install and operation from a single management console with a web-like user interface.

There’s clearly a need for a better approach to managing datacentre infrastructure, says Jerry Vochteloo, principal systems engineer for Symantec, Australia

“The demands on datacentres are growing dramatically… [They] are becoming so complex they are virtually unmanageable.”

Symantec says its Data Centre Foundation suite simplifies the task of comprehensive management. The suite includes Veritas Net Backup, which enables the back-up of many sites to be coordinated over the network; Storage Foundation 5.0 (to be released next quarter), which makes the whole storage resource more visible and manageable; Sever Foundation, combining configuration management, server provisioning and clustering; and Veritas’ i3 application performance management.

Another product scheduled for release in the next quarter is Version 5.0 of Veritas’ cluster server, which eases workload, by distributing it over several machines, to increase uptime.

The bundling exercise results in cost saving that could see customers ditching rival products. However, this could also be seen as a Symantec “lock-in”, too, Votcheloo acknowledges.

There are also some strong “point products” from market rivals, says Votcheloo. And a homogeneous environment might be difficult to crack, too.

But, in the heterogeneous environment that has evolved in many datacentres, standardisation of the interface over “all major open systems, Unix, Linux and Windows platforms” would see a cost reduction of 20-30%, an unbeatable proposition, says Votcheloo.