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Solid state drive visibility

Symantec’s content-aware, dynamic storage tiering capabilities ensure organizations’ storage deployments remain cost-effective as they take advantage of new technologies that increase performance. This provides complete, coordinated server and storage visibility and policy based, non-disruptive information movement. Storage Foundation automatically optimizes heterogeneous storage environments, including those that contain both SSDs and traditional disk storage. Storage Foundation is the only storage management solution that can automatically discover SSD devices from leading array and server vendors and optimize data placement on SSD devices transparently.

Completing the thin provisioning ecosystem

The only cross platform, thin-friendly file system in the industry, Veritas File System enables improved storage utilization by integrating with the thin provisioning ecosystem. Announced last year, the Veritas Thin Reclamation API enables automated space reclamation for thin provisioning storage arrays and is now fully supported by Symantec partners IBM and 3PAR, with more hardware partners planning to follow suit. Storage Foundation is the only solution that discovers thin provisioned storage across heterogeneous vendors, while also enabling automated and online storage reclamation allowing organizations to stay thin over time.

As organizations increasingly deploy thin storage arrays in order to improve storage utilization and drive operational efficiency, products implementing instant space reclamation such as IBM’s XIV Storage System and Veritas Storage Foundation are setting the standard for the storage industry to enable the on-line reclamation of storage that is no longer being used,? said Doug Balog, vice president, System Storage at IBM.

Storage Foundation’s SmartMove technology together with Veritas Volume Replicator makes it easy for enterprises to migrate from thick to thin storage over any distance. Only the storage that is being used by the application is moved, making data and array migrations fast and efficient even across wide areas. Storage Foundation now provides users with unprecedented visibility into legacy volumes and thin volumes, along with efficient central management and automated storage reclamation. With Storage Foundation for Windows, these capabilities are now extended to Hyper-V environments allowing organizations to better manage both their physical and virtual storage environments.

Storage aware application clustering

With this release, Symantec adds enhancements to Cluster File System and Cluster Server, providing improved availability of Oracle environments. In contrast to traditional failover approaches, which require both application and storage to move to an alternate server, Cluster File System and Cluster Server provide concurrent access to information and require only the application to be moved. As a result, organizations can now failover applications running single-instance Oracle or single-instance IBM DB2 in seconds. These enhancements create a more robust, manageable, scalable and highly available solution for critical application and database environments.

Green IT and Power Savings

With Storage Foundation the ability to accelerate the adoption and optimize the benefit of thin provisioning, tiered storage and solid state drives is realized, enabling the efficiency of storage utilization to be significantly improved. By both increasing the utilization of the most power efficient storage and facilitating the decommission of the most obsolete and power demanding storage, Storage Foundation can effectively eliminate electricity (KWh) otherwise needed to power unused or underutilized storage—which also reduces need for data center cooling and floor space. These reductions are readily attainable, and provide concrete, measurable benefit both from a cost and environmental impact reduction perspective.

As point of comparison, every 200 terabytes of tier one storage either reduced in the data center or not added by using storage management to control growth represents an annual electricity savings of $54,200 and a CO2 emissions reduction of 960,000 pounds*. An annual 1KWh power consumption reduction approximately equals an annual reduction of 12,000 pounds of CO2**.

Storage Assessment Service

Symantec also offers Symantec Storage Assessment Service to help organizations address their storage challenges and exploit the latest advances in storage optimization and management. With Symantec Storage Assessment Service, Symantec consultants assess the efficiency of a customer’s current storage environment and identify areas for cost savings. Symantec experts define the gap between best practices and the current environment, including people, processes, and technology, and assist in deployment of technologies such as Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server.

– Pricing and Availability

Pricing for Veritas Storage Foundation starts at $695 per server. Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server are now generally available.