Symantec Synonymous with Storage?
Symantec (http://www.symantec.com) is known throughout the high-tech world for its security solutions. Did you know Symantec has moved into the storage arena?
Spurred by its recent acquisition of PowerQuest, Symantec has created a new business unit devoted to storage. With the release of LiveState Recovery 3.0 last month, the company will pursue a strategy for integrating storage, security, and systems management markets to provide solutions to meet all of its customers' security needs.
"We're not tackling the entire, broad systems management or storage management space—we'll leave that to the traditional framework vendors. But we will focus on the key areas in which these disciplines converge that specifically enhance the security of our customers' infrastructures," L. D. Weller, product manager for Symantec's enterprise administration business unit, said in a recent briefing with Windows IT Pro.
—Amy Eisenberg
Storage and Innovation
Storage sometimes seems like an unglamorous necessity. But from my recent conversations with several storage vendors, I'd like to share some interesting perspectives and introduce you to some innovative storage technologies.
Business and regulatory requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) are changing the way the IT industry thinks about storage, according to Jim Damoulakis, chief technology officer (CTO) of GlassHouse Technologies (http://www.glasshouse.com), and Bill Peldzus, director of storage architecture at GlassHouse. This vendor-independent storage services company helps businesses assess storage needs, implement solutions, and manage ongoing operations. Storage is no longer just about the technology. Now process, policies, metrics, and organizational structure are also crucial considerations for storage solutions, Jim and Bill said.
To deal with the new complexity of storage management and the large amount of required storage, 3PAR (http://www.3par.com) has developed 3PAR Thin Provisioning for its 3PAR Utility Storage disk array products. Craig Nunes, 3PAR's senior director of marketing, explained that Thin Provisioning lets you safely allocate as much logical capacity as you'll need over an application's lifetime, while drawing physical capacity from a common pool as needed (i.e., only when application writes occur). Gartner has placed 3PAR in the "visionary" corner of its Magic Quadrant.
Revivio (http://www.revivio.com) is innovating in data protection and recovery. Instead of building on the move-and-copy approach to data protection, Revivio's Continuous Protection System (CPS) is an instant-restore appliance that restores data exactly as it existed at any previous point in time.
Did you know that a typical corporate user sends and receives 84 email messages (using 10MB of storage) per day? iLumin's (http://www.ilumin.com) Assentor Enterprise is a solution that provides archiving, mailbox management, regulatory compliance, and discovery and litigation support for email and instant messages. The Assentor Mailbox Manager is a policy-based tool for managing an enterprise mail server's size, performance, and service level agreements (SLAs).
Earlier this year, Jerry Cochran wrote "The buzzword of the year in the storage industry seems to be Internet SCSI (iSCSI)" and quoted Gartner as predicting more than 1.5 million iSCSI-connected Storage Area Networks (SANs) by 2006 (see http://www.windowsitpro.com, InstantDoc ID 41627). EqualLogic (http://www.equallogic.com) embraces iSCSI with its PeerStorage Array 100E SAN solution. The new Auto-Snapshot Manager for Windows enhances backup and restore in Windows Server 2003 environments by automating snapshots. John Joseph, vice president of marketing at EqualLogic, told me, "We provide all the capabilities needed for sophisticated storage management and data protection of business-critical information on iSCSI SANs—without additional software purchases." He added, "Not only do we deliver the features, but we automate the processes, simplifying storage."
Bob Guilbert, vice president of marketing and sales for NSI Software (http://www.nsisoftware.com), welcomed Microsoft's announcement of its new Windows Server System product, Microsoft Data Protection Server. NSI's Double-Take provides continuous real-time data replication and high availability for midsized to large companies, and Bob said that NSI and Microsoft are working together to provide data protection and recovery solutions for businesses using Double-Take. Running Double-Take with Data Protection Server will ensure offsite protection and recovery of Data Protection Server backups and rapid recovery of applications and data.
—Karen Forster
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