Veritas Operations Manager 4.0: Defining Action-based Storage and Availability Management

[DLamorena]

This week Symantec is announcing Veritas Operations Manager 4.0 and Veritas Operations Manager Advanced. We’re really excited on the Storage and Availability Management team to deliver these new solutions that we believe address some of the key painpoints our customers are facing as they implement virtualization and cloud computing. In reality, these are the same challenges data center managers have been facing for years. What we want to do is help them deliver high service level times, prevent downtime so their businesses can be up and running and then ensure they’re operating with the highest levels of efficiency.

When you introduce new technology like virtualization or thin provisioning there’s always risk; and we want to help you get visibility and minimize that risk so these critical applications can remain online and perform their required functions. As you move to the private cloud there’s also the need to automate. IT has to deliver services on demand and we want to help customers eliminate these manual processes so they can scale their businesses. That requires automating and orchestrating these critical processes so they can actually deliver IT services on demand. There’s also the need to understand what’s going on with storage consumption and then give administrators the tools to do something about it. There’s no denying that storage growth is escalating out of control. As companies move to virtual environments, utilization rates remain low and your storage consumption needs are also going to grow. How do we understand the ways we’re using storage in a physical and virtual world and then build in tools that identify where the waste is and take action? Enter Veritas Operations Manager 4.0 and Veritas Operations Manager Advanced.

It starts with looking at storage and availability resource management. With Veritas Operations Manager 4.0 we let you understand what’s going on in your storage and availability environment by giving you visibility and control across physical, virtual and private cloud environments and any mix of storage and server operations. You get a single control point to manage your current data center as well as the private cloud you want to build. We can empower you to understand the dependencies of these applications running as a business service and then combine that with in-depth reporting and the ability to actually do something to address these needs. If you migrate storage how does that impact the application itself? You can automatically start/stop those business services. Let’s say you have planned maintenance that impacts storage. We can stop the services, migrate and then start them back up again completely transparent to the user. We can automate all of these processes that would have required multiple operators and lots of time without a tool like Veritas Operations Manager.  We think this is a huge differentiator!

In addition, if you’re going to deliver storage as a service, you really need to be able to provision storage on demand. Pay as you go is also important. You need to deliver storage chargeback across multi vendor storage, SAN and NAS. Finally, we’ve built a solution that provides agentless deployment. It’s customizable to your environment to allow you to get up and running quickly and manage your unique environments with the highest levels of efficiency.

In summary, we believe enterprises are looking to gain better visibility into their virtual environments. Once they have that visibility, how can they be empowered to control and manage that environment and ensure it’s highly available? Next, how does IT deliver storage as a service, on demand, trackable with accountability built in with chargebacks? Further, how do they get results faster with agentless deployment and then rich reporting that you can actually take action on? We call it action based management and Veritas Operations Manager is the answer. It’s a free solution that comes with Storage Foundation and Cluster Server. Veritas Operations Manager is available in May, 2011 and Veritas Operations Manager Advanced is $995 per managed host and will be available later in FY12.