Storage and Availability Management Blog

The Storage and Availability Management Group at Symantec is dedicated to providing solutions that enable efficient storage management and highly available infrastructure. Find news, information and tips that help you to resolve your storage management, high availability and disaster recovery issues across the heterogeneous data center.

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  Updated: Crash - Data Center Down 03 May 2013

  IT Justice League, assemble! Part 2 of 2

    Last time on Data Center Down, Crash detailed the meeting of several IT “Super Friends” at the 3rd Annual Red Hat Partner Conference, held in January. Let’s first take a moment to tip our own hats to two Focus Partners who took home awards: Emergent, LLC, was named Partner of the Year for demonstrating the highest level of commitment to Red Hat through their engagement and investments. DLT Solutions was honored as Public Sector Virtualization Partner of the Year for collaborating to create exceptional growth in the virtualization ecosystem. Now that I’ve acquainted you with my data architecture allies, I’d like to introduce the Lex Luthor of our realm: Storage. If you’ve ever struggled to integrate paths across physical and virtual environments, suffered from downtime while upgrading applications, or lost data during migration, then you might...
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  Updated: Eric.Hennessey 25 Apr 2013

  Don't monkey around with disaster recovery testing

    A colleague tipped me to this blog post at the Netflix Tech Blog that I found both amusing and interesting. Some months back, I was talking about disaster recovery testing with a customer, and he used the phrase "chaos monkey" to describe all the things that can go wrong in the data center in the course of testing a DR plan. Little did I know that there was actually a chunk of code named Chaos Monkey written to make things go wrong on purpose.   The folks at Netflix developed Chaos Monkey to randomly disable instances of their production (yikes!) application to test the service's resilience against such failures. The engineers at Netflix will occasionally turn Chaos Monkey loose in their environment to make its mischief while the engineers monitor service availability.   Since the development of Chaos Monkey,...
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  Updated: Theresa LaVeck 28 Mar 2013

  Deliver on Your Service Level Agreements at Vision

    Vision Las Vegas is just around the corner, April 15-18. This year the Information Availability, Intelligence and Data Protection track focuses on business continuity, storage and solid state drives, and meeting service level agreements. SLAs must be met whether you’re keeping mission-critical data centers running or serving up frosty beverages. Disasters, configuration errors, poor performance, thirsty customers…it’s an ever-changing race to keep your operation available, fast, and resilient. We’re ready to show you how to meet the challenge of delivering on service level agreements. Check out these great Vision session and activities: Why Host-Based SSDs are Critical for SLA in Mission-Critical Data...
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  Updated: Crash - Data Center Down 19 Mar 2013

  IT Justice League, assemble! Part 1 of 2

    Greetings, earthlings. I’ve been enjoying some much-needed R&R off the grid for the first time since beginning our U.S. tour last October. A thrilling trip to Las Vegas in December left my circuits fried, but our most recent jaunt to the 3rd Annual Red Hat Partner Conference North America was enough to put me into a post-failover coma. While in San Diego Jan. 14 through 16, our team marveled conference attendees with the fruits of our Silver Sponsor collaboration with Red Hat. Meet the super friends Director of Product Management Tom Harwood delivered a keynote session on the first day, explaining how employing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux data center basically enables you to create your own virtual Justice League. Stick with me on this one: Let’s say that your business is Batman, Symantec is Flash, Oracle is Green Lantern, Veritas Cluster Server is Wonder...
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  Updated: Eric.Hennessey 19 Mar 2013

  Business continuity for virtualized applications

  I speak with a lot of our customers, and a frequent topic of conversation is around virtualization. Just a few years ago, most I spoke with didn't have more than 20 to 30% of their applications virtualized. Now that figure is typically around 70% or higher, and most customers say their goal is to hit as close to 100% as they can. The common blocker to virtualizing, though, is concern over application availability. It's for this reason that we developed our ApplicationHA solution a few years back to manage in-guest monitoring of applications and restart of the application in the event of a failure. More recently, we announced a new release of Veritas Cluster Server which allows users to create clusters of virtual machines, and failover an application to an already-running standby virtual machine. Taneja Group has been watching the disaster recovery/business continuity space in the industry, and just recently...
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  Created: Mike Reynolds PMM 14 Feb 2013

  Beware of the Application Blind Spot!

  As we've mentioned many times on these blog pages, organizations are virtualizing more of their applications for good reason.  Virtualization means lower costs for power and cooling, with greater agility.  However, there are risks in terms of virtualizing business critical applications as it relates to high availability and disaster recovery.  While the VMware tools protect the VM and the physical infrastructure from failures, they are not aware of the applications running in the virtual environment.  This is the "application blind spot" that IT organizations need to consider as they move business critical applications to virtual environments.  The Symantec high availability and disaster recovery solution, aka Veritas Cluster Server, monitors and recovers applications removing this blind spot.  To learn more about...
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  Updated: Deborah_lin 14 Feb 2013

  New Release: New Windows Server 2012 platform support release for Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows

  Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Today, we are taking our relationship with Microsoft to the next level. Symantec is announcing the new Windows Server 2012 platform support release for Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows. With the new Windows Server 2012 platform support release, Storage Foundation HA for Windows provides online storage management, full VM level automated Disaster Recovery, and Microsoft Virtual Fiber Channel support for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012. This allows administrators to attach an array LUN directly into the Hyper-V VM and get a shared storage model within Hyper-V VM that is very similar to how they would share storage in a physical environment. Administrators can enable traditional clustering and high availability configuration and deployment in the Hyper-V guest. Why wait? Check out what’s new in store here: http://www....
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  Updated: Crash - Data Center Down 15 Feb 2013

  Vegas, Vitamins and Veritas Cluster Server

  As you may recall, I was pretty salty about being denied access to Symantec’s Worldwide Technical Symposium and Partner Tech Engage Conference last October. Well, I might have overreacted a teeny bit. I was cordially invited to attend the Gartner Data Center Conference during the week of Dec. 3, 2012. With my metal shards glimmering like a thousand nebulas, attendees simply couldn't resist stopping to see me as they moved between the conference and expo halls. I imagine this is what every day feels like for a Wheel of Fortune slot machine. It was truly an event for the high rollers. As one of the world’s leading IT research and advisory companies, Gartner assembles the A-Team of analysts to present the latest and greatest in the technology space several times each year. Our big buzz phrase? Business continuity. And who better to tell you about it than the data center who...
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  Created: jmartin 05 Feb 2013

  SORT mobile is now available on the App Store!

   SORT functionality is now available as a mobile application on the Apple App Store! The SORT mobile app supports five key features from the SORT website: SPVU Calculator (includes Server Tier mapping) Error Code Lookup Patch Lookup Installation and Upgrade Checklist (Storage Foundation and NetBackup) News and Alerts (Storage Foundation and NetBackup) Go to http://sort.symantec.com/mobile to get more information and to download the app to your iPhone or iPad. Be sure to mention the availability of this app to your coworkers!
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  Updated: Eric.Hennessey 05 Feb 2013

  Achieving Cost-effective Disaster Recovery

  There was a time when, for many organizations, implementing a disaster recovery infrastructure meant deploying millions of dollars worth of server, storage and network hardware at an alternate data center. The belief was that to do DR right, you had to duplicate the production infrastructure and the result was a lot of expensive equipment sitting idle until a disaster - or a disaster recovery exercise - put the equipment to use. Needless to say, those days are gone and they're not coming back. Such investments are simply no longer affordable or practical. And thanks to modern technology, they're also no longer necessary. In this first attempt of mine at a video blog - or "vlog", if you will - I'll describe how Symantec's disaster recovery solutions can leverage virtualization technologies to achieve a cost-effective DR infrastructure. ...