Symantec Joins the Burgeoning Cloud-Development Crowd

Symantec joined the growing cloud-building platform crowd Nov. 19 by unveiling Veritas Operations Services, a cloud computing-based online services platform that adds a measure of risk management to the package.

Veritas, of course, is the storage company that data security provider Symantec acquired back in 2005 for $13.5 billion. All of Symantec's storage-related products and services still use the Veritas brand.

With VOS, Symantec aims to help organizations identify hidden risks in their data centers in order to improve service availability. The risk management features in the new cloud platform emanate from the Symantec side of the company.

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Veritas Installation Assessment and Veritas Storage Foundation Health Check are the first two services available now, Symantec marketing executive Josh Kahn told me. They enable IT organizations to perform prioritized, preventative maintenance using the latest known good configurations and best practices, Kahn said.

"A lot of the risk involved here in handling all these things comes from configuration issues," Kahn said. "For example, for an application to be delivered to the business, Oracle [parallel database] depends upon Sun Solaris, which depends upon storage connectivity, which depends upon a particular array. And so on. All these moving parts, from the application to the storage devices, must work together seamlessly, otherwise there will be problems with application downtime or configuration issues."

This "seamless" structuring of workloads and data flow is what VOS is designed to provide.

VOS is delivered to users via a cloud computing model. It monitors the system for best practices, optimal configurations, hardware compatibility and software compatibility lists for Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, and other operating systems and SAN (storage area network) software and firmware, Kahn said.

"With the launch of Veritas Operations Services, Symantec is delivering a valuable cloud service offering to its data center customers," said Bob Laliberte, storage analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group.

"It's those very large, complex environments with lots of moves, adds and changes that will benefit the most by leveraging a service that proactively validates configurations. However, any customer with broad deployments of Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server should strongly consider using Veritas Operations Services today—it will help them improve availability, reduce complexity and reduce costs," Laliberte said.

The Veritas Installation Assessment Service is available now and is priced at $500 per physical server. The service is available at no charge for customers currently subscribing to maintenance for Veritas Storage Foundation or Veritas Cluster Server. Go here for more information.