NEW RELEASE: Introducing Symantec Storage Foundation High Availability and Symantec ApplicationHA 6.1 for Windows

April 7th 2014: Symantec today announces the release of Symantec Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows 6.1 and Symantec ApplicationHA 6.1 for Windows environments.

With Microsoft Hyper-V climbing the Gartner Magic quadrant, it is no surprise that Hyper-V has become a formidable alternative to VMware virtualization. Symantec supports our customers' move toward a software-defined world and maintains its platform-agnostic view by allowing our customers to chose the virtualization platform that fits their needs. 
The latest release of Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows and Symantec ApplicationHA is a key step in supporting our customers that run the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization stack. This release enables organizations to adopt Flash/SSD for mission-critical workloads for increased and reliable performance without compromising on availability. This release also further enhances the high availability and disaster recovery capabilities which our customers already use.
 

New features for Hyper-V in this release include:

• SmartIO - Granular, online caching at the application level. With SmartIO, application architects, server administrators, and database administrators can move reads and writes inside the server. In lab tests replicating real-world use-cases, SmartIO delivers up to 3x performance improvement while reducing storage costs by 70%.
• Storage Pooling - Storage services on a per virtual machine (VM) basis for Hyper-V virtual machines protects VM data from single LUN/Array failures, helping maintain availability of critical VM data.
• Virtual Business Service support for Microsoft Failover Cluster - Comprehensive and automated disaster recovery for critical multi-tier applications that have components running on Microsoft Failover Cluster. Benefits include quick and smooth application recovery with automated start/stop and recovery algorithm between the multi-tier application components.
• Application High availability and Disaster recovery for Hyper-V virtual machines – Symantec Cluster Server now supports local, metro and wide-area failover for applications running in Hyper-V virtual machines and Symantec ApplicationHA now provides application monitoring and restart for applications in Hyper-V virtual machines.

Installation

• Installation, Support and Release Notes
• Symantec ApplicationHA 6.1 for Hyper-V - Install, Configure and Manage Part 1
• Symantec ApplicationHA 6.1 for Hyper-V - Install, Configure and Manage Part 2
• Symantec ApplicationHA 6.1 for Hyper-V - Install, Configure and Manage Part 3
• Symantec ApplicationHA 6.1 for Hyper-V - Install, Configure and Manage Part 4

Resources for Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows & Symantec ApplicationHA 6.1:

• Download – https://fileconnect.symantec.com
• Documentation
  • Hardware Compatibility List
  • Software Compatability List
• Product Pages
  • http://www.symantec.com/storage-foundation-high-availability-for-windows
  • http://www.symantec.com/application-ha

Existing Storage Foundation, Cluster Server and ApplicationHA customers with active maintenance are entitled to upgrade to the latest version at no charge. Version Upgrade SKUs can be used by customers to reinstate lapsed maintenance.