Symantec simplifies datacentre management

Symantec's Data Center Foundation suite promises to improve control and cut costs

Symantec has introduced a combined application suite to give organisations greater visibility and control over the servers in their datacentres while removing the need for multiple management tools.

Symantec said its Data Center Foundation system will interact with every database, middleware and storage application in use to help IT managers see what is running, track and configure changes, identify problems, provision servers and applications, deploy patches and roll out new software via a single central console.

The software is available as a free download for use on dual-CPU servers, and customers pay upwards of $98 (£53) per additional processor if they wish to receive support or host more than four volumes. It is available for servers running Linux and Unix, but not yet Windows, though Symantec is committed to support Windows Vista when it is finally released.

“Every datacentre in the world has a variety of hardware and middleware layers, but what does that lead to? Hundreds of different tools required to make this hardware deliver the applications environment that runs the business,” said Kris Hagerman, senior vice-president of Symantec’s data centre management group.

Scott McNealy, chairman and co-founder at Sun Microsystems, which ships Symantec software such as Enterprise Vault on around half of its servers, agreed that there is too much complexity in datacenters, but did not say whether Sun would deploy Data Center Foundation to its customers.

“Everybody has gone out and got body parts from all these different vendors [of datacenter tools], and created these enormous, interesting Frankenstein like things - I don’t know a single datacentre that looks the same,” McNealy said.

Larry Lozon, vice-president of datacentre services at outsourcing firm EDS, estimated that standardising on a smaller number of management tools could help datacentres shave up to 50 percent of costs from their operations.

“I don’t know the dollar value of the savings but the 50 percent is calculated from reducing the need to have people at remote sites or freeing up their time to do other things,” said Lozon. “There is also potential to manage the storage environment better to make sure you are buying less capacity over time.” He added that storage utilisation could be increased by up to 30 percent in some cases.

The Data Center Foundation system contains a number of elements. At its core is a new application called Server Foundation based on two technologies acquired or licensed by Symantec: Configuration Manager (formerly Relicore Clarity) and Provisioning Manager (Q Associates’ OpForce). It is augmented by a new version (5.0) of the Veritas Storage Foundation storage management and virtualisation application, and upgraded features in the Cluster Server load balancing and availability tool.