Symantec and Red Hat, who have been collaborating on cloud-related projects for about a half-dozen years, June 29 announced an extension of their agreement to co-develop software and services for the deployment of agile private and hybrid clouds inside highly resilient data centers.
The announcement was made at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World conference in Boston.
The forthcoming storage and cloud management packages, now in development, are being built upon Symantec storage, security and availability tools and will run on the open-source Red Hat Enterprise Linux cloud platform, which includes built-in clustering capabilities.
The most important business benefit of this collaboration is that the combination of these components enables the deployment of an automated off-site disaster recovery cluster server for global IT systems. This provides off-premises disaster recovery and automated failover of multi-tiered applications to any disaster recovery (DR) site on Earth.
Distances between data centers do not impact this DR system.
In addition, Red Hat’s Cluster Server manages the data replication layer and provides a single-click DR process, simplifying recovery workflowwhich is most often not a simple process.
The Symantec-Red Hat package also provides nondisruptive failover testing to ensure that recovery is configured to work properly when it is neededwhether the downtime is from power loss, natural disasters or other causes.
“As we’ve written previously, IDC believes Linux will be one of two primary operating systems that will power public cloud infrastructure,” IDC Vice President of System Software Research Al Gillen said. “Symantec and Red Hat teaming to improve data availability and disaster recovery in data centers has the added benefit of bridging these data centers to Linux-based cloud infrastructure, enabling enterprise customers to leverage cloud computing where it makes best sense.”
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the de facto Linux data center standard, since it is deployed by more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 companies. Symantec’s storage and availability management solutions are used by 99 percent of the Fortune 500.