The company boldly claims to be the only provider of an integrated infrastructure software package that delivers backup, storage/server and application performance management across the data center.
Data security and storage provider Symantec continued its concerted push into the data center automation space Nov. 29 by introducing two key new features to augment its Veritas Server Foundation product—an application director and a patch manager.
Symantec, of Cupertino, Calif., also announced that it has updated both its Veritas Configuration Manager and Veritas Provisioning Manager.
Veritas Application Director enables IT to control when and where multitiered applications run across heterogeneous physical and virtual environments in order to maximize server utilization and application availability. Veritas Patch Manager adds patch management and distribution functionality to the existing operating system and application provisioning capabilities to Veritas Server Foundation.
"Symantec promised more data center automation when they announced Data Center Foundation [last May], and this product is one of several [some of which will be available in the future] that start to deliver on that promise," Dianne McAdam, director of Enterprise Information Assurance of The Clipper Group, told eWEEK.
If a data center has hundreds of applications, managing all of them can be a problem, McAdam said.
"Veritas Application Director provides one view of all of the applications managed under this product. But it takes it a step further: You can define interdependencies across different platforms," she said.
For example, picture an application that spans several platforms; it has a database that runs on Unix, but the Web servers run on Linux, McAdam said.
"Now the database server goes down, and I have to move that database application to a new server," she said. "Application Director knows that the Linux Web servers are logically connected to the database and will gracefully bring down [stop] all of the application components, move the database application to a new server and bring up all components in the right sequence."
Application Director does this in an automated way, which prevents human errors and speeds up recovery time, McAdam said.
"It can also simulate future events. Say I want to bring in one big server to replace three small servers. It has a simulation program that lets IT determine if the applications on the three smaller servers can be moved to the larger server," she said.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Symantec Adds New Automation Features to Server Foundation.
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