Symantec Transforms Data Centre Operations with Comprehensive Solution for HA/DR Preparedness

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SYDNEY April 29, 2009 Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced Veritas CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor, a software management tool that transforms data centre operations by increasing productivity, proactively identifying availability risks and lowering costs. Disaster Recovery Advisor furthers Symantecs goal to help organisations efficiently secure and manage their information by expanding on Symantecs market leading high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) capabilities to identify configurationvulnerabilities in any data centre and ensure applications can be recovered in the event of an unplanned outage.

Disaster Recovery Advisor delivers value quickly with a comprehensive assessment available within two days of installation. This is made possible by an agentless architecture and zero configuration of its knowledgebase with more than 3000 risk signatures. Disaster Recovery Advisor provides a comprehensive assessment through in-depth visibility into the application, server, and storage environment across all leading storage, server, and software solutions.

Proactive Risk Identification Ensures Successful HA/DR

An August 2008 survey from Symantec found that more than 30 percent of disaster recovery tests fail as organisations remain susceptible to unknown configuration changes or configuration drift. Successful disaster recovery requires end-to-end monitoring and reporting of application, server, and storage configurations and a flexible way to test HA/DR. WithDisaster Recovery Advisor, Symantec is delivering a comprehensive solution to proactively identify hidden configuration risks which jeopardise the success of businesses recovery.

Our customers continually face the challenge of simplifying operations and cutting costs while ensuring the full recovery of their business in the event of a failure, said Yogesh Agrawal, vice president of Symantecs CommandCentral Product Group. In large scale data centres, proactively identifying configuration risks without disrupting the business is so difficult that most organisations dont do it. With Disaster Recovery Advisor, IT organisations can automatically detect thousands of such issues, understand the risk to their applications, servers, and storage and take action while efficiently leveraging existing IT resources.

Two days to value with extensive knowledgebase and agentless capabilities

Disaster Recovery Advisor has the industrys most extensive knowledgebase of thousands of vulnerabilities and critical issues nearly anything that may prevent a data centre from recovering from an outage. This extensive knowledgebase enables customers to identify availability risks in their environment within two days of installation. Installation of Disaster Recovery Advisor is quick and seamless, as the solution is agentless and requires zero configuration.

The knowledgebase is continuously and automatically updated, to ensure that HA/DR plans will be successful and IT organisations will be protected from the latest HA/DR issues as they are identified. For any identified risks, Disaster Recovery Advisor automates the remediation process by providing resolution guides that help fix the problem before performing much needed DR tests, saving time and other resources.

Veritas CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor will help organisations to quickly identify potential configuration issues, said Bob Laliberte, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Because the Disaster Recovery Advisor knowledgebase contains thousands of items and continually updates itself, customers wont have to suffer from the latest issues that other data centres experience its almost like an automated antivirus solution for data centre DR environments.

Comprehensive Support Enables Recovery and Cost Savings

As part of a successful HA/DR testing plan, Disaster Recovery Advisor supports the heterogeneous data centre server, storage and databases. It also supports the leading clustering and storage management solutions. Disaster Recovery Advisor supports all major operating systems as well as the major storage arrays and databases, allowing data centre managers to have confidence that they can utilise it in any data centre environment.

Disaster Recovery Advisor is the latest offering in Symantecs storage and availability management portfolio and further delivers on Symantecs goal to transform data centre operations by increasing productivity, proactively identifying risks and lowering costs. In an effort to help customers more efficiently secure and manage their information, Symantec recently announced Veritas Operations Services, an online services platform to identify hidden risks and drive productivity and availability.

Pricing and Availability

CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor is generally available with pricing based on the number of physical servers that are being monitored. Symantec is also offering a free risk assessment to help evaluate customers HA/DR preparedness.

Facts

According to research conducted by Symantec in 2008:

• One-third (30 percent) of organisations have to execute a disaster recovery plan each year, yet only 47 percent say they could have 100 percent normal operations within one week.
• 30 percent of disaster recovery tests fail and one-third (32 percent) of organisations report that testing will impact their customers, and one-fifth (21 percent) admit such testing could impact their organisations sales and revenue.
• 43 percent of organisations report that they feel exposed to configuration change management issues.

About Symantec

Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage, and systems management solutions to help consumers and organisations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. More information is available at www.symantec.com.

NOTE TO EDITORS: If you would like additional information on Symantec Corporation and its products, please visit the Symantec News Room at http://www.symantec.com/news. All prices noted are in U.S. dollars and are valid only in the United States.

Symantec and the Symantec Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Any forward-looking indication of plans for products is preliminary and all future release dates are tentative and are subject to change. Any future release of the product or planned modifications to product capability, functionality or feature are subject to ongoing evaluation by Symantec, and may or may not be implemented and should not be considered firm commitments by Symantec and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.