Symantec Pitches Backing Up into a Private Cloud

With the latest release of Symantec's storage management and high-availability products, the company is positioning the technologies as a way to create private cloud-like capabilities without ripping and replacing datacenter infrastructure.

Symantec this week unveiled the version 6.0 releases of 10 products that are scheduled to be available in December. They are Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, Symantec ApplicationHA, Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing, Veritas Cluster File System, Veritas Replicator, Symantec VirtualStore, Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows, Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC and Veritas Storage Foundation for Sybase ACE. Also included in the launch was Veritas Operations Manager 4.1.

Chandra Rangan, senior director of product marketing in the Storage and Availability Management Group at Symantec, said the architects at the Fortune 500 companies and other large corporate clients that Symantec talks to are interested in cloud, but with caveats.

"To them the public cloud is interesting, and OK for certain types of workloads. But for core business applications, where we really come into play, they're more interested in the private cloud," Rangan said in an interview. "It doesn't make sense for [them] to set up a new entire infrastructure. They've already made huge investments. Moving the end-to-end stack is tough, time-consuming and extraordinarily expensive. They're also worried about lock-in [with the private cloud vendors]."

Symantec isn't claiming to be a private cloud vendor with the latest group of releases. The company has just tuned current products to enable some of the main drivers for private cloud. "You can get the most out of your storage assets and manage it more like a cloud to obtain faster provisioning, multi-vendor storage chargebacks and the ability to scale and contract storage assets without disruption," Rangan said.

Although the current rev of the products resulted from direct conversations with customers, Symantec will be relying on the channel to drive demand and handle field implementations. "Over a year and a half back, we started relying more heavily on the channel, when we dismantled our internal services organization," Rangan said. "A lot of these become architectural design and service-based sales. Now [partners] can go and help customers design the type of architecture that works with what they have."

Posted by Scott Bekker on October 06, 2011