Symantec kicks off data centre push

Symantec has made a bid for a greater share of the enterprise data centre market with the release of its Symantec Data Centre Foundation suite.

The offering combines Veritas NetBackup, Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Server Foundation and Veritas i3, and a range of consulting services in an effort to offer a full data centre management package.

The suite aims to convince enterprises to standardise on Symantec as a common management platform, server and storage provider, A/NZ systems engineering manager Paul Lancaster said.

“We’d like it to be a data centre takeover but [the suite is] aimed more at taking the complexity out of data centres and leveraging greater ROI out of your ICT,” he said.

Technologist and principal systems engineer Jerry Vochteloo said the suite would allow ICT managers to perform activities like storage tiering, server and storage consolidation, data migration regardless of the current mix of vendors within the dat centre.

“We’re like the Switzerland of [data management],” he said. “We don’t care what hardware you use, even if it’s all just EMC.”

Lancaster said the suite would be compatible with a range of competing networking, storage, server and virtual hardware, and operating environments, middleware, applications and databases.

In an effort to encourage greater mid-market trial and adoption of the offering, Symantec had also released a free version of its storage management application, Storage Foundation Basic, he said.

The suite is partially available now with full availability from September at per CPU pricing, Lancaster said.