Wood said he expects that the new system will be able to handle a variety of tasks, such as allocating new disks in response to high demand for data, and then report on them. Currently, Corrections Corp. has to manually add disks to arrays as needed, he said.

Villars said the Data Center Foundation plan is a good first step for Symantec. But in the long run, he said, "they need to connect the pillars into a more coherent system. That's the next step."

Over the long term, the various products in Data Center Foundation will be fully integrated using a configuration management database, said Robert Soderbery, vice president of product management for Symantec's data center management group.

The different components "are silos right now," he acknowledged. Soderberry said the integration plan offers many opportunities for Symantec, including an effort "to bridge the gap between the operational and the administrative world."

For example, he explained, if an operations manager saw an alert showing that a server was down, he could fix it himself rather than having to contact an expert to do it.