The Cupertino, Calif.-based company first announced Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 products in July for AIX and Linux, and it has been expanding on the software's functionality since then (see ""). The latest version of the product combines Storage Foundation for Windows and Veritas Cluster Server software products.

The new product provides online storage management for high availability of data and optimized I/O performance across multiple hardware platforms. Through a single interface, users can manage Windows, Linux and AIX, as well as iSCSI environments, said Sean Derrington, Symantec's director of storage management.

The Cluster Management Console function offers a secure Web-based tool for use with Veritas Cluster Server to provide enterprise-reporting capability for data centers, regardless of their physical location. "So you'll be able to see Windows clusters, Red Hat clusters and Solaris clusters all in the same GUI, and you'll be able to view their status, health and report on that," Derrington said.

Symantec is also giving away free copies of Storage Foundation Basic for Windows, a product with all the same online performance and configuration wizards as its enterprise-class big brother, but that is designed for edge systems with two CPUs or less, and four volumes or less. The software can be downloaded at www.symantec.com/sfbasic. "We did this so organizations can run Storage Foundation on every server in their data center," Derrington said.

Storage Foundation 5.0 HA for Windows' dynamic multipathing function automatically seeks the path that will get a request back to the host fastest. "Whether it's an HBA failure, or a switch failure, or a controller failure, we'll move all that traffic over to the available paths," Derrington said.