As data centers expand, the complexity of heterogeneous computing environments has become an impediment to efficient IT service delivery. Companies are looking for ways to address this complexity and improve the manageability of their data centers. Symantec can help you standardize your IT environment, systems management tools, and configurations to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs and complexity, and mitigate downtime.

Challenges

In today’s data centers, the proliferation of hardware and software platforms, operating systems, and devices pose significant operational challenges for IT managers. Likewise, the complexity of multi-tier, distributed application architectures have led to an explosion of servers, storage arrays, databases and middleware platforms for IT managers to provision and manage. In all cases, heterogeneous environments have significantly increased operating costs—thus, undermining the benefits brought by more economical and flexible processing and storage capacity.

Organizations typically use 50 or more different tools to manage their volumes, file systems and point-in-time copies, as well as technologies to manage clustering, replication, backup and recovery, and other critical aspects of their IT infrastructure. Each technology is unique and usually provides its own user interface or management framework, adding administrative complexity and cost.

Solutions

Symantec’s experienced professionals can help standardize your storage and server configurations, configuration interfaces, clustering, and system builds. A simplified management and configuration interface will markedly enhance your IT operations, and result in fewer errors and unscheduled downtime.

Symantec consultants can significantly increase your project success with a reference architecture for standardization that provides a consistent set of architectural best practices. The reference architecture includes integrated operational workflows, a change and configuration framework, a solution rollout plan, and a migration plan for applications and data.

Symantec's Data Protection Standardization Service standardizes technologies, processes, policies, and interfaces to reduce the complexity and associated costs of managing multivendor, heterogeneous data protection environments.

Why Symantec?

By teaming with Symantec, you can expect to reduce your systems management, maintenance, and labor costs. In addition, you can improve the use of best practices for core IT operational activities, and automate infrastructure provisioning and maintenance.

With no hardware agenda, you can count on Symantec to help you design and implement a heterogeneous infrastructure management system that enables standardization across your enterprise. Your users will experience improved quality of IT services—improved availability and responsiveness. While your management can count on improved governance, and reduced operating and capital expenditures.

"Through a successful implementation with Symantec Consulting Services and Sun Microsystems, we now have our entire enterprise environment, including all of our applications and servers, on Veritas NetBackup. Using eight NetBackup master servers, 12 full media servers, and 159 SAN media servers, we back up over two petabytes of storage, involving 21,000 backup jobs each week. Our backup success rate is at 98 percent, and the few that do fail are quickly recovered. Indeed, our restore rate with NetBackup is 100 percent."

Ken Theis
CIO and Director
Michigan Department of Information Technology