Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud.
We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.
CUPERTINO, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 09/12/07 -- Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) today announced
enhancements to its Veritas Cluster Server for VMware ESX and Veritas
Application Director solutions which strengthen VMware environments for
production use and simplify management of virtual machines in the data
center. Cluster Server for VMware ESX, an enterprise-class high
availability and disaster recovery solution now provides expanded support
for critical business application environments like Microsoft Exchange and
enhances disaster recovery capabilities with broader data replication
support. Application Director introduces heterogeneous virtual machine
management capabilities to control virtual machines and optimize server
resource utilization in large data centers with hundreds or even thousands
of physical servers and virtual machines.
"Symantec is directly addressing the severe challenges of managing today's
complex data centers by providing a single platform that can reduce
downtime and improve manageability across heterogeneous virtual and
physical server environments," said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president, Server
Foundation product group, Symantec. "Enterprises now have a solution that
enables them to deploy server virtualization into production environments
with confidence, by protecting their key applications from downtime, and by
helping them better manage physical and virtual server sprawl."
These new enhancements complement Symantec's existing data center solutions
which provide extensive data protection, high availability, disaster
recovery and storage management capabilities for both physical and virtual
environments. In addition to Cluster Server for VMware ESX and Application
Director, Symantec offers unique capabilities for VMware environments in
its Veritas CommandCentral Storage and Veritas NetBackup solutions.
NetBackup 6.5 offers industry leading consolidated backup and granular
file-level restore capabilities and CommandCentral Storage 5.0 offers
end-to-end storage visibility, mapping virtual machines, physical servers,
storage arrays and physical disks. These solutions help customers reduce
the complexity of managing heterogeneous virtual and physical data centers
and realize cost savings by enabling customers to standardize on a common
layer of infrastructure software.
Comprehensive High Availability and Disaster Recovery for VMware ESX
Cluster Server for VMware provides added protection for applications in
virtual machines by monitoring the health of the application, the guest OS,
the virtual machine, the virtual resources, the physical server and the
underlying storage. If a failure should occur to any of these components,
applications and virtual machines are automatically failed over to another
physical server. Additionally, in the case of a site failure, Cluster
Server for VMware can automate the process of failing over all the
protected applications and virtual machines to another data center
regardless of whether the data center is on the same campus, in the same
metropolitan area or located across the globe.
Enhancements include expanded support for critical business applications,
including Microsoft Exchange and SAP, enabling IT professionals to have
confidence as they move business-critical applications into virtualized
environments. Expanded disaster recovery capabilities also include broader
support for data replication offerings including Hitachi TrueCopy, enabling
customers to provide mission-critical level Recovery Point Objectives and
synchronize application and data availability at a remote data center.
The Cluster Server Management Console helps simplify the management of
applications in virtual environments, enabling administrators to manage
multiple clusters from a single console -- regardless of whether the
clusters are running in physical or virtual environments, are running on
different operating systems, or are located in different data centers.
This new release of Cluster Server supports VMware ESX 3.0 and is available
today.
"Server management is one of the industry's greatest challenges, especially
as organizations fight server sprawl through both virtual and physical
environments," said Stephen Elliot, Research Director, IDC. "As
virtualization continues to move into production environments,
comprehensive management tools that ensure availability of critical
applications and automate common server management tasks are a must. IT
organizations must consider their ability to reuse skills and knowledge to
simplify the process of getting virtualized applications up and running, in
production."
Automated Application and Virtual Server Control for Heterogeneous
Environments
With Application Director, IT organizations can better optimize server
resource utilization by controlling when and where applications and virtual
machines run, across heterogeneous environments. Application Director is a
key element of the Veritas Server Foundation product family which delivers
comprehensive data center automation (DCA) capabilities. Key enhancements
to Application Director in this new release will enable users to track
resource utilization, and then start, stop, move or resize virtual machines
to improve utilization and ease overall management. Application Director
also allows users to create and enforce policies, based on the requirements
of the application, enabling them to increase application availability and
flexibly respond to changes in application workloads.
In addition, new role-based access and control capabilities define who can
perform specific management operations across both physical and virtual
servers. This simplifies management of large data centers with hundreds or
even thousands of physical servers and virtual machines. This new release
of Application Director will be available in early 2008 and will support
heterogeneous virtual machine environments, including VMware ESX, Solaris
Zones and AIX Micropartitions.
Symantec Uniquely Qualified to Meet Enterprise Data Center Needs for VMware
ESX
Symantec's market leading solutions for data protection, high availability,
disaster recovery and storage management set the standard for managing
heterogeneous virtual and physical environments in enterprise data centers.
Virtual machines are rapidly moving into production environments,
introducing a complicated new set of platform and support requirements into
already complex data centers. Through its Veritas infrastructure software
products, Symantec delivers best-in-class functionality that supports every
major server operating system and storage hardware platform. Symantec is
committed to ensuring virtual machine environments like VMware are truly
ready for the enterprise, by providing industry-leading infrastructure
capabilities that support VMware and all major server virtualization
platforms.
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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