MOUNTAIN VIEW, Ca. – Symantec Corp. has announced the availability of the Veritas Operations Services, a new cloud computing-based online services platform that help organizations identify hidden risks in their data centers thus improving service availability and increasing productivity of the operations staff.
“We want to help customers proactively manage their environment and reduce risk in their environment,” said Sean Derrington, director of storage and availability of Symantec Corp.’s management group. “Veritas Operations Services gives them some of that automation and some of that insight into their complex configuration so they are aware of the risk they are exposed to and are able to improve the operational efficiency. We are leveraging cloud-based services to deliver these capabilities to customers.”
The first two new services that make up the Veritas Operations Services are Veritas Installation Assessment and Veritas Storage Foundation Health Check. Both, which are available now, provide an alternative to traditional reactive operations models and enables IT organizations to perform prioritized, preventative maintenance using the latest known good configurations, best practices and data center risks.
Delivered via a cloud computing model, Operations Services tracks best practices, optimal configurations, hardware compatibility lists and software compatibility lists for Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, leading operating systems and storage area network software and firmware. A collection of Web-based services use this intelligence to identify data center risks and improve productivity of operations teams as they try to deal with the new data center architectures and scale.
The first service, Veritas Installation Assessment Service improves systems administrator’s overall efficiency when preparing for Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server installations and upgrades.
Installation Assessment Service delivers an intuitive, web-based validation of the complex configurations in the server and storage infrastructure. This proactive approach simplifies version upgrades and new installations by validating the complete stack prior to starting the installation process.
Key Installation Assessment Service features include automated, agentless data collection by the Installation Assessment Service which validates server and storage configurations prior to product installation or upgrade to determine the readiness of the infrastructure. The service also provides detailed reporting indicating pass, fail or warning of critical configuration variables with Web-based hyperlinks directly to required patches and relevant documentation. There is also proactive patch notification service for available patches related to the unique server and storage configuration in the environment; and agentless assessment that can run on a single server or across multiple servers and multiple OSs without requiring the installation of Storage Foundation or Cluster Server.
Derrington noted that the top two problems that the Veritas Installation Assessment Service has identified (which accounted for 60 to 70 percent of errors noted) were arrays that were incompatible due not being on hardware compatibility lists and insufficient disk space.
He added that Veritas Installation Assessment Service gives them detailed reports of everything that was valid but also everything that was not valid. For example, if the service discovered insufficient disk space, the report would inform the customer or channel partner what storage array was connected to the server, how much disk space Veritas Storage Foundation needed and how much disk space was allocated. Users can then go and allocate the necessary storage capacity to alleviate that problem.
Additionally, all alerts include steps for guided remediation to speed and simplify resolution.
“We don’t fix any of the problems for customers,” said Derrington. “This was something customers were explicit about. They wanted to have the information but they wanted to be able to incorporate any changes or modifications into their own processes.”
Derrington said that customers and channel partners have been asking for something like the Installation Assessment Service. In particular, partners wanted a solution to help them decrease time to deliver value to their customers.
“Veritas Installation Assessment Service dramatically eliminates complexity and uncertainty for channel partner so that the channel partner can go to the customer and use [the service] to understand [their environment] before upgrading or installing software, which dramatically shortens the work partners have to do to validate their customer’s environment.”
The second service, Storage Foundation Health Check, identifies configuration issues in four categories: availability risks, performance risks, utilization issues and violations of best practices
Health Check finds configuration errors that can result in downtime, performance issues and poor resource utilization. The Health Check Service draws upon the experience of more than 15 years of data center deployments in the world’s most mission critical applications.
Health Check and Installation Assessment Service are the first of several planned Symantec offerings. Derrington cited that the next service offerings would be focused around storage management and high availability areas.
Bob Laliberte, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, stated that with the launch of Veritas Operations Services, Symantec has delivered a valuable cloud service offering to its data center customers.
“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 Storage Foundation and Cluster Server should strongly consider using Operations Services today — it will help them improve availability, reduce complexity and reduce costs,” he added.
Installation Assessment Service and Health Check are available now through Symantec’s Web site or through its reseller partners. Pricing is at $500 per physical server. The service is available at no charge for customers currently subscribing to maintenance for Storage Foundation or Cluster Server.
This column was written by Vanessa Ho of ConnectIT, an IntegratedMarCompany
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