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.
Storage Foundation 5.0 also now has a wizard that walks users through configuring storage for clusters, high availability, point-in-time copies of data or for setting up and testing servers for disaster recovery.
"If you're setting something up for [something other than Windows, such as] Oracle, BlackBerry or Siebel, or whatever else you're running, we'll walk you through a different process by allowing you to click on buttons or simple pull-down menus and having you choose from options we provide to you," Derrington said.
The software can also clone configurations and apply them to other servers.
Derrington said the centralized management console allows an organization to understand applications, servers and storage resources for thousands of Windows servers. The software is also backward-compatible to Storage Foundation for Windows 4.0.
"It allows them to understand all the resources associated with that host. So whether its data replications with Veritas Volume Replicator ' or my volume is 99 percent full, it's going to show me this in the Web-based GUI," Derrington said.
Coming in about 90 days to Storage Foundation 5.0 HA for Windows is Management Server, which will allow IT managers to define applications in business terms. For example, if you have an Exchange application residing on multiple servers, it can be identified as one application so that if anything goes wrong with any single component, it will be flagged as a problem with the application as a whole, Veritas said.