CUPERTINO, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 03/14/07 -- Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) today announced its portfolio support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, as well as powerful new storage management capabilities for Xen virtualization. Through its partnership with the Linux market leader, Symantec plans to provide its core Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, and Veritas NetBackup solutions for customers as they adopt the new subscription release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Symantec and Red Hat are also announcing a collaborative effort to deliver rapid, highly trained support expertise to customers through joint engineering, pre-release testing, and a unique and innovative shared virtual lab support model.

"As the Linux ecosystem continues to develop, our IT department is always looking for ways to leverage new technology while more efficiently managing our data center assets -- without increasing budget," said Jim Meredith, manager of information technology, Replacements Ltd, the world's largest retailer of discontinued and hard to find china, crystal, silver, and collectibles. "Leveraging the timely support of Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, and Net Backup for the latest offering from Red Hat will help us further simplify our storage and server operations and migrate more quickly to the new capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. In addition, the introduction of the new joint support model by Symantec and Red Hat, offers organizations like ours critical, Unix-class levels of joint support."

To further aid customers in managing their complex data centers, Symantec is leveraging the open source Xen server virtualization that will be bundled as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and other Linux distributions to launch a beta program for its Storage Foundation and Dynamic Multi-pathing technologies. For the first time with any server virtualization platform, this will unite best-in-class storage virtualization and I/O multi-pathing with virtualized workloads, enabling a standardized, centralized management model across all workloads and all operating systems, physical or virtual.

Symantec and Red Hat are unveiling a joint customer initiative, which will ensure faster, more comprehensive customer support resolution to better serve enterprise organizations. The innovative cooperative agreement between Symantec and Red Hat provides technical support engineers remote access to Symantec and Red Hat testing lab environments, combining both companies' server and storage infrastructures to address virtually all customer support requirements. In addition, technical support engineers are being cross-trained to better support joint customers. The result will be superior support quality, integrated escalation processes, and much faster time to resolution since the partners can troubleshoot and fix customer issues together on the same hardware.

"With thousands of data center implementations on Linux, Symantec customers expect enterprise-class features, performance, and service," said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president of Symantec's Storage Foundation Group. "Symantec is delivering on these expectations, providing solutions that offer the highest levels of availability while exploiting the latest capability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5."

"IT organizations are eager to adopt Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as an effective platform for driving IT costs out of deploying and managing their infrastructure software," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat Enterprise Solutions. "The rapid availability of Symantec's complete data management solutions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as well as our collaborative support efforts will help ensure that customers will benefit from their new open source environments as quickly as possible."

Symantec offers an extensive range of security and availability solutions that support Linux, including its Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server product families. These solutions provide IT organizations unprecedented visibility and control of the diverse server and storage assets in their data centers. Symantec also offers Veritas Storage Foundation Basic, a free version of Storage Foundation designed for edge-tier and infrastructure workloads. A growing number of Linux users are adopting Veritas Storage Foundation Basic as a powerful, affordable tool for enjoying the dramatic benefits of storage virtualization and standardizing their data center infrastructure software. Users can find additional information at www.symantec.com/sfbasic.

"Linux plays a critical role in corporate data center operations, so it is imperative that customers have proven tools that enable them to manage not only their Linux infrastructure but their entire heterogeneous storage and operating system environments," said Bob Laliberte, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Customers should be impressed with Symantec's ability to perform I/O multi-pathing in a virtualized environment. This visibility enables customers to link applications to infrastructure in complex virtual environments, providing faster problem resolution and improved overall control."

About Symantec

Symantec is a global leader in infrastructure software, enabling businesses and consumers to have confidence in a connected world. The company helps customers protect their infrastructure, information, and interactions by delivering software and services that address risks to security, availability, compliance, and performance. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has operations in 40 countries. More information is available at www.symantec.com.

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CONTACT:

Jerry Gowen
Symantec Corporation
+1 (503) 690 4714
jerry_gowen@symantec.com

Amanda Jones
Connect Public Relations
+1 (360) 588 1790
amandaj@connectpr.com