Symantec Unveils Next Generation Storage Resource Management with Veritas CommandCentral 5.0

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today unveiled a major release of the Veritas CommandCentral 5.0 product family, a key component of the company’s Storage United initiative to help enterprises address their most pressing storage challenges with a unified, software-oriented approach. Veritas CommandCentral 5.0 provides industry-leading scalability and reliability coupled with the breadth of heterogeneous support demanded by large enterprise data centers around the globe.

The Veritas CommandCentral 5.0 family includes Veritas CommandCentral Storage 5.0, Veritas CommandCentral Enterprise Reporter 5.0 and Veritas Process Automation Manager 5.0. With the release of this integrated solution set, Veritas CommandCentral becomes the only comprehensive storage resource management (SRM) solution in the market to optimize storage utilization, automate storage processes and align storage with business goals.

“CommandCentral Storage provides us with an instant view of how storage is allocated across the five different platforms in our data center, helping us increase utilization and cut storage administration costs by 90 percent,” said Daniel Trim, director, operations, UNIX systems and database management for Health Alliance Plan, one of Michigan’s largest health plans. “By giving us visibility into where our storage is and who is using it, CommandCentral helps us more effectively allocate storage resources and align IT with the needs of our business.”

Optimizing Storage Utilization in Physical and Virtual Environments with CommandCentral Storage

The proliferation of virtualization technologies introduces new challenges in storage management. Veritas CommandCentral offers the unique ability to address these challenges by providing end-to-end visibility in both virtualized server and storage environments. New in the latest release is advanced support for VMware, HDS TagmaStore and IBM SAN Volume Controller. This advanced support gives IT organizations the ability to effectively manage storage capacity at an application level in virtual environments, which hasn’t been possible until now.

Average storage utilization rates across data centers are disconcertingly low, typically hovering at 30 – 40 percent, according to Symantec research. CommandCentral Storage 5.0 analyzes end-to-end storage consumption in both physical and virtual heterogeneous environments, identifies storage that can be reclaimed and enables organizations to increase storage utilization levels by up to 40 percentage points. By driving up utilization and providing organizations with flexibility and choice of storage hardware, CommandCentral Storage helps customers reduce their storage spend. This includes data center space, power and cooling costs, which are scarce resources and an increasing percentage of the IT budget.

Delivering Business Alignment with Enterprise Reporter

Many organizations do not fully understand how storage assets are being used by business applications and consequently cannot make informed decisions about storage budget expenditures. CommandCentral Storage 5.0 and Enterprise Reporter tighten this relationship by delivering global business-level reporting capabilities that provide executives with easily customizable reports containing the business insight they require and on demand answers to global storage infrastructure questions. Enterprise Reporter includes a global view of storage with the ability to roll up information from multiple data centers into a single comprehensive view – organized by lines of business, geography or other customized views.

“Few environments have tools that enable them to consistently view, report on, and manage their storage environments. As storage growth continues and challenges mount, firms will have no choice but to take a more proactive approach,” wrote Andrew Reichman, Analyst, Forrester in “SRM is Knocking; Open The Door”, May 2007. “Veritas CommandCentral Storage from Symantec is one of the most comprehensive and robust SRM tools on the market targeted for large complex storage environments.”

Improving Operational Efficiency with Process Automation Manager

Storage administrators are struggling to ensure uptime and maintain service levels in an ever expanding and complex storage environment. With Veritas Process Automation Manager 5.0, Symantec introduces a comprehensive IT process automation platform that helps storage teams cope with this challenge. This solution enables standardization of storage management processes, implementation of consistent operational policies and automation of these processes. With Process Automation Manager, organizations can improve efficiency of storage operations, reduce time to provision storage and effectively manage service levels.

Delivering Industry Leading Scalability, Reliability and Heterogeneous Support

The new 5.0 release extends CommandCentral Storage’s leadership in scalability by supporting over 3,000 servers, 6 petabytes of storage capacity, and 12,000 switch ports with a single management server. This unique level of scale enables CommandCentral Storage to provide data center wide storage management.

Fully compliant with the industry standard SMI-S 1.1 specification and deeply integrated through multi-vendor API agreements, the 5.0 release of CommandCentral Storage adds support for Fujitsu, 3PAR, HP EVA, IBM DS4x00 arrays and NetApp iSCSI devices enabling comprehensive monitoring, reporting, and active management across a heterogeneous infrastructure.

CommandCentral Storage also provides management and reporting of local and remote replication for high availability and disaster recovery architectures. Extending its current support for EMC TimeFinder, it now also supports EMC’s Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF); Clariion SnapShot, MirrorView and Snapview; NetApp SnapMirror; and HDS Shadow Image replication solutions.

“IT organizations need to have visibility and control over their heterogeneous storage infrastructure in order to deliver storage services to the business,” said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president of Symantec’s Storage Foundation Group. “CommandCentral Storage 5.0 is the only SRM solution that scales across the data center and supports everything in the data center, providing a solution that is ready for the largest and most demanding organizations. With the unique combination of storage resource management, storage process management and enterprise reporting, CommandCentral Storage 5.0 enables organizations to optimize their storage assets, improve storage processes and deliver storage services to the business.”

Accelerating Storage Optimization with New Services Offering

Symantec Global Consulting Services is launching a Storage Assessment Program, which provides an objective view into the state of the customer’s storage environment. Through this fixed price program, Symantec will assess the organization’s storage infrastructure and provide the customer with a comprehensive report detailing the current utilization of storage resources, potential efficiency gains from improved utilization and recommendations to improve storage processes.

Endorsing CommandCentral’s Leadership

Leading storage and service vendors have recognized Symantec’s leadership in SRM and offer storage solutions with CommandCentral. These partners include Fujitsu, NetApp, 3PAR, NovusCG and Incentra. (Please see below for quotes on this announcement from Symantec’s partners).

Pricing and Availability

The Veritas CommandCentral 5.0 product family is licensed per server. Veritas CommandCentral Storage 5.0 and Veritas Process Automation Manager 5.0 are now generally available. Veritas CommandCentral Enterprise Reporter 5.0 is planned to be generally available in the next 60 days. The Storage Assessment Program is available now at a fixed price of $25,000.

For a special podcast highlighting the CommandCentral 5.0 product family, please visit: http://www.symantec.com/about/news/podcasts/detail.jsp?podid=ent_command_central_storage_5

About Symantec

Symantec is a global leader in infrastructure software, enabling businesses and consumers to have confidence in a connected world. The company helps customers protect their infrastructure, information and interactions by delivering software and services that address risks to security, availability, compliance and performance. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has operations in 40 countries. More information is available at www.symantec.com.

Partner Quote Sheet for CommandCentral Storage 5.0

Fujitsu
“The combination of Symantec CommandCentral Storage and Fujitsu’s highly reliable and ultra-secure ETERNUS storage solution provides customers with complete visibility and control over their storage environments while reducing risks associated with data loss and theft,” said Hitoshi Matsushima, senior vice president, Storage Systems Unit, Fujitsu Limited. “With Symantec as our preferred storage resource management partner, we will continue to provide our joint customers with the new solutions they need to store, protect, and access their ever-growing volumes of business critical information.”

Incentra
“Symantec is an innovator in storage resource management, and we rely on CommandCentral Storage as a tool we use to conduct assessments of our customer’s storage environments and advise them on their storage strategy,” said Bill Stith, Managing Director, Storage Services at Incentra. “We are excited about CommandCentral Storage 5.0 as it allows us to identify storage inefficiencies and help our clients improve their storage utilization and implement data classification and tiered storage strategies.”

NetApp
“CommandCentral Storage 5.0 extends our existing partnership with Symantec and strengthens our capabilities in heterogeneous iSCSI and FC SAN storage management,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “Our customers seek lower storage management costs and maximized storage utilization coupled with end-to-end visibility particularly in virtualized environments. CommandCentral is the leading solution in enterprise SRM, and we share Symantec’s commitment to improving customers’ productivity and efficiency.”

NovusCG
“We are excited to offer services based on Symantec’s latest addition to its solid storage management repertoire,” said Stephen O’Keefe, Chief Operating Officer at NovusCG. “Given our focus on global enterprises, CommandCentral Storage 5.0 with its beefed up infrastructure and focus on more efficient environment polling allows it to handle large scale environments. Additionally, its end-to-end visibility is enormously helpful for troubleshooting connectivity issues and performance, especially with databases. Finally, Symantec’s continued commitment to a broad range of supported hardware and software aligns tightly with the reality of today’s customer environment.”

3PAR
“We share Symantec’s commitment to standards, and our joint solution is enabled through our mutual support for SMIS 1.1,” said David Scott, 3PAR President and CEO. “Together, we offer scalable and cost effective solutions to customers to optimize the usage of their storage assets and reduce storage spend.”