Symantec Corp. announced yesterday the global release of its Veritas CommandCentral 5.0 line of storage solution products in an effort to help bridge the gap between IT departments and enterprise businesses.
Veritas CommandCentral 5.0 is Symantec’s solution for a unified, software-oriented approach and includes Veritas CommandCentral Storage 5.0, Veritas CommandCentral Enterprise Reporter 5.0 and Veritas Process Automation Manager 5.0.
The release is part of Symantec’s Storage United initiative, which aims to provide storage as a service to enterprises to help them better manage their storage management processes.
Kevin Coughlin, director of product management at Symantec Corp., details the types of customers Symantec is looking to target with Veritas CommandCentral 5.0.
“There are no verticals in the market that we specifically target,” Coughlin said. “We’re targeting customers who are already users of Veritas classic products.”
Coughlin also outlined some unique features of the line and mentioned the ability of being able to provide end-to-end visibility while working in both virtualized server and storage environments. Other notable features include global business-level reporting capabilities and standardization of storage management and the automation of these processes.
To better prepare the channel with the new release, Coughlin said Symantec is focused on training select resellers so they are able to successfully install and configure all of the products by taking advantage of both web, virtual and in-class training sessions. Another key area of concentration is spreading awareness and education when it comes to storage management.
According to Symantec research, Coughlin said the average utilization rates of storage in data centers is especially low, at around only 30 to 40 per cent. He said with CommandCentral 5.0, Symantec hopes to enable customers to raise those levels by up to 40 per cent.
“One of the biggest challenges IT has is knowing which resources they’re using,” Coughlin said. “In general, customers don’t know what’s on the floor. If you don’t know what’s there, you can’t manage it. You need to correlate resources to better handle data. Symantec has the solution.”
With Veritas CommandCentral Enterprise Reporter 5.0, storage information from multiple data centers are consolidated into a single global view, categorized and managed by factors such as geography and business.
If enterprises are looking to more efficiently manage their storage operations and business service levels, Veritas Process Automation Manager 5.0 is their Symantec solution. The company has introduced this as an extensive automation platform that allows for the standardization of storage management processes in addition to automating them.
When asked about its scalability, Coughlin boasts CommandCentral Storage 5.0 can support over 3,000 servers and 12,000 switch ports while also providing six petabytes of storage capacity, all with the use of a single management server.
But Coughlin said aside from features, what it all comes down to at the end of the day is collaboration and the ease of use.
“We believe there are huge gaps out there with no visibility and collaboration with IT and business,” Coughlin said. “Uniting the storage and the administration is our goal here. We’re not telling businesses which models to use; we just want to give them the ability to change to a unified storage model.”
