Veritas Storage Foundation

Storage Virtualization across heterogeneous server and storage infrastructure

• Industry-Leading Compatibility: Operating systems supported include Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and AIX, each with robust server and storage hardware compatibility.
• Disk Virtualization: Groups physical disks together into logical disks that can be dynamically resized. Flexibility to have multiple volumes within a single server or volumes that span and are visible to multiple servers.
• Automation and Online Administration: Repetitive storage tasks can be automated and performed online, including file system and volume resizing (including shrinking), domain reconfiguration, defragmentation, backup and off-host processing.
• Automated performance tuning: Administrators no longer need to manually tune writes for performance.

Storage Foundation Manager—Centralized management across diverse applications, servers and storage

• Single view to manage multiple applications, servers and storage for faster application deployment times, higher service levels and reduced risk of human error.
• Centrally manage heterogeneous or like host migrations.
• Ensure server and storage configurations are correctly set up before performing application upgrades or server migrations with pre-migration checks.
• Central management of fiber channel connections, firmware and drivers for host bus adaptors, and fiber channel switch ports reduces application downtime.
• Simultaneous management of multiple paths on multiple hosts ensures applications aren't impacted during maintenance and reduce the chance of human error during migrations.

Dynamic Storage Tiering—Dynamically move files to different storage tiers to rapidly respond to changing business needs

• Policies can be created that will move files (such as date created, last time accessed, owner, size or name).
• Files will be dynamically moved without having to be taken offline.
• Veritas File System spans multiple volumes enabling dynamic data migration across multiple volumes/tiers of storage hardware without changing how information is accessed (/filesystem remains unchanged).
• The move is completely transparent to the users and applications that own the files - they don't need to know the files have moved.
• No application, database, or backup/recovery policy modifications are needed.

Portable Data Containers—Easily and quickly convert data for use between Unix and Linux operating systems, enabling seamless data migration

• Administrators can deport data from one operating system and import it on another in minutes, without ever creating a copy of the data or moving the data.
• Quickly and automatically converts the data for the new platform whether it is a Unix or Linux platform.
• Eliminates need to use NFS or tape to move data between operating systems.

Dynamic Multi-pathing (DMP)—Robust I/O path availability and performance

• Intelligent algorithms to load-balance storage I/Os across multiple host bus adapters (HBAs) for faster throughput.
• DMP can re-route I/Os to an available data path in the event of an HBA failure for increase application availability.
• Multi-host DMP management for firmware upgrades and path management can be centrally managed with Storage Foundation Management Server.

FlashSnap and Veritas Volume Replicator—Local and remote data protection

• FlashSnap: Takes instant, space-optimized or full-volume snapshots of data for backups, testing, decision support and off-host processing. Only synchronizes changed blocks for fast resynchronization and supports snapshots of heterogeneous storage.
• Veritas Volume Replicator—Replicates data over IP networks for mission-critical applications that require remote recovery sites. Flexible, high performance alternative to traditional array-based replication architectures.
• Storage checkpoints: Instantly creates disk backups of files or file systems that require no additional disk space. The backup can be easily restored by the user. Useful for maintaining an original copy of a file system while doing development work.

Thin Provisioning—Simplified storage provisioning and capacity management

• Thin Friendliness: Optimize thin provisioned storage and maximize storage utilization across all operating systems - Unix, Linux and Windows and any storage array. Veritas File System is the industry’s only cross-platform file system that is one of the most thin-friendly file system in the industry.
• SmartMove: Host-based data migration for Unix, Linux, and Windows platforms across heterogeneous storage arrays. SmartMove enables the migration of applications from thick (traditional) storage to thin storage and the automatic reclamation of unused space, while keeping applications online.
• Thin Reclamation: Automated, granular, online reclamation of allocated but unused thin storage so that thin environments can remain thin over time. Veritas Storage Foundation uniquely leverages the server knowledge of actual storage usage, and the capabilities of thin reclamation compliant storage arrays to reclaim allocated but unused storage making thin storage reclamation fully automated and transparent to the server configuration and the applications.