Many organizations believe that they have a solid and ready to execute business continuity plan in case of a disaster.  However, according to a 2010 Forrester survey*, “many organizations have lulled themselves into a false sense of security” when it comes to how they value their preparedness.  The survey also revealed that proper plans of planning, testing, and maintenance are not actively tested as often as they should be.  This lack of preparedness is a costly strategy in terms of revenue, employee productivity, reputation, among  other factors.  Specifically, the survey found that an average recovery took 18.5 hours with 4.8 hours of data loss.  In addition, according to a StorageCraft blog, in 2011, disasters cost $52B versus $10B in 2010.  These numbers clearly indicate that organizations must evaluate their business continuity...

The Storage and Availability Management 6.0 release was recently covered in the Wall Street Journal. The article focuses on 6.0 highlights, including preparing for the private cloud, Virtual Business Service, file system deduplication and compression, and tighter integration. Read the article.

Symantec today announced a major refresh to its Storage and Availability Management portfolio to help customers build the private cloud they want by transforming their existing infrastructure. Symantec’s high availability solutions will enable users to architect resilient private clouds with fast local or global recovery of complete business services and data replication across any distance to meet their recovery time/point objectives. Symantec can orchestrate the recovery of a business service, even if its components (various databases, application servers, and web servers) run on different operating systems or virtualization technologies. 

As more IT organizations move to the cloud, Symantec’s new storage management offerings will also help IT organizations manage and deliver elastic, resilient storage for cloud workloads by providing the ability to scale storage capacity up or down while applications remain online and reducing the storage footprint...

For some organizations, the idea of virtualizing their mission critical applications is perceived to be more riskier and its advantages are not yet compelling to make the switch.  In fact, according to Symantec's latest Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud Survey, 40% of CEOs and 42% of CFOs are reluctant to make the leap to virtualization.  Some of the cited reservations are around downtime and the lack of visibility into virtualized environments.  However, IT users can get around these challenges by making sure that they deploy virtualization tools that are suited for their particular needs. A foolproof virtualization plan can deliver cost savings, efficiency, increased productivity, high availability, disaster recovery, etc.  Recently, Dan Lamorena, Product Marketing Director within Symantec's Storage and Availability Management Group authored an article in the Virtualization...