Facing challenges around storage utilization and performance in virtual infrastructures? Increase in storage consumption could have a dramatic impact on your IT budget. Deploying virtual machines is not as efficient when deploying thousands. And from your end-user’s perspective, when a large number of users log into their desktops simultaneously, performance can suffer dramatically.

Symantec VirtualStore helps you fully benefit from your virtualization investments by addressing virtualization’s storage challenges. Based on Veritas Cluster File System technology, VirtualStore is built for VMware virtual machine management in the form of a highly scalable, clustered NAS solution. It allows for rapid provisioning of servers and virtual machines, and efficient, space-optimized cloning and boot-up of virtual machines, all through VMware’s management console, vCenter. It allows you to:

• Reduce virtual desktop cost by as much as 50% as compared to...

Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 introduced some nice changes into the vxassist utility to support rudimentary allocation templates and volume attribute persistence.  Support for these will allow environments running SF to start regularizing some of their operations related to volume-level provisioning.  For example, you can standardize layouts of volumes created to support production databases versus development, or you can enable or disable stretch clustering based on some volume type name which could be centered on the name of an application that the volume might be created for.

These new changes are in stark contrast to the much more sophisticated ISP (Intelligent Storage Provisioning) template language that was added in 4.0 but that was dropped in 5.1.  ISP was a large scale structural change that in the end just proved too complex.  Instead, the new changes simply extend traditional vxassist functionality and syntax with rule files and the ability to...

On May 27, 2010 at the financial analyst day, the Symantec Storage and Availability Group Senior Vice President, Anil Chakravarthy and the Information Management Group Senior Vice President Deepak Mohan, teamed up to discuss the trends in storage.  Slides of the Storage Trends Panel are available here.  The recording and full analyst day session transcripts are available here.

Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) is an ideal  tool if you require high performance, have lots of money and don’t mind complexity.  However, if you are using RAC for high availability, there is another solution that provide almost the same failover performance at a fraction of the cost.  Read this blog from Storage Switzerland to find out more.