Virtualising Business-Critical Applications Made Easy

Symantec Corp. today announced key technology developments designed to help customers more effectively deploy, protect and manage their essential applications and databases running in virtual environments. Security, availability and data protection challenges have restrained many organisations from realising the full benefits of virtualisation for the applications that are critical to their businesses, including CRM, ERP and email. Symantec’s integrated solutions for security, high availability, endpoint management, storage management and backup and recovery enable customers of all sizes to benefit from virtualisation, trusting that their business-critical applications are secure, available and recoverable in spite of the high demand placed upon them.

High Availability

Virtualisation of business-critical applications has become mainstream, and many organisations are moving applications such as MS SQL, MS Exchange, Oracle databases, and SAP to virtual platforms.  Virtualisation provides simple and robust infrastructure availability, but until now has lacked solutions to protect applications inside virtual machines.  Based on industry-leading Veritas Cluster Server technology, Symantec ApplicationHA integrates with VMware vCenter™ Server and VMware High Availability to ensure high availability for applications running in virtual machines. Symantec ApplicationHA complements VMware HA with application health monitoring and control. The recently announced ApplicationHA is the result of extensive collaboration between Symantec and VMware to help organisations accelerate the virtualisation of business-critical applications while providing simple application-aware availability.

Storage Management

At VMworld 2010 Symantec is also unveiling Symantec VirtualStore, a new solution designed to minimise storage costs in VMware environments. As organisations scale their virtual environments, they face increasing storage requirements and performance bottlenecks associated with retaining hundreds or even thousands of virtual machine images. Based on Veritas Storage Foundation technology, VirtualStore is a software-based NAS solution that scales servers and storage independently, efficiently provisions virtual machines, and delivers advanced storage optimisation capabilities for VMware environments. VirtualStore was developed in collaboration with VMware and integrates with VMware’s management tools such as VMware vCenter Server and VMware vMotion™.

Backup and Recovery

Applications handle an organisation’s most important information, and regular, reliable and efficient backups are essential. But the backup process itself can’t interfere with the performance of the production application. Symantec NetBackup 7 provides streamlined protection across both physical and virtual environments, helping organisations reduce complexity, maximise operational efficiency, centralise administration and simplify recovery. NetBackup 7 natively integrates with the VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection, supports VMware vSphere™ 4.1, and delivers flexible, built-in virtual machine-optimised deduplication.

Symantec Backup Exec 2010 helps small and midsized organisations backup and restore an entire virtual machine or a granular data object from a single pass backup, reducing backup and recovery times and shrinking storage hardware requirements. Backup Exec 2010 includes new support for VMware vSphere 4.1 with block-level backups including incremental/differential support to reduce backup windows and storage costs. Data deduplication can also be applied to VMware client backups to further reduce and consolidate storage resources.

Security

Symantec is working closely with VMware to ensure Symantec security solutions work seamlessly in VMware deployments. Symantec security solutions are optimised for virtual environments and help harden servers, secure endpoints and enforce security policies.

Symantec Critical System Protection provides real-time hardening and intrusion monitoring while maintaining high performance and availability.  It protects the VMware vSphere host and guest instances with layered controls. The resource utilisation leveling technology in Symantec Endpoint Protection is crafted to ensure simultaneous scans and updates don’t impact performance of virtual hosts.  The Symantec Protection Center centralises security management, to manage, update and monitor security policies and configurations across both physical and virtual environments.   Symantec Brightmail Gateway 9.0 is optimised for VMware vSphere and is certified as a VMware Ready™ Virtual Appliance, enabling customers to scale their messaging security infrastructure while taking advantage of the resource utilisation benefits of virtualisation.

Endpoint Virtualisation and Management

Desktops and laptops, rich clients and thin clients, physical desktops and virtual desktops, shared systems and dedicated systems each have their place in today’s enterprise. With all of this disparity, manageability has become the next big challenge for IT. Symantec Endpoint Virtualisation Suite turns this challenge into an opportunity with dynamic desktops and application provisioning, application conflict elimination, and proactive license compliance and optimisation.

In addition, Symantec’s endpoint management solutions seamlessly manage VMware environments and maintain the stability of tier-one applications. Altiris Server Management Suite 7.0 from Symantec provides the essential capabilities to discover, provision, manage and monitor server infrastructures across a range of physical and virtual platforms, allowing IT administrators to increase the availability of applications and automate manual efforts to ensure a consistent, reliable and supportable IT environment.