Symantec says virtualisation growth exceeds 50%

VIRTUALISATION has grown to over 50 per cent, according to Symantec Corporation, even as the firm introduced key technology developments designed to help customers effectively in the deployment, protection and management of their essential applications and databases in virtual environments.

Virtualization is the creation of a virtual rather than the actual version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources.

Making this observation recently was the vice president, Product Marketing at Symantec, Mr. John Magee, who said that security, availability and data protection challenges have restrained many organizations from realizing the full benefits of virtualization for the applications that are critical to their businesses.

He also said that Symantec’s integrated solutions for security, high availability, endpoint management, storage management and backup and recovery would enable customers of all sizes to benefit from virtualization, in spite of the high demand placed upon them.

“Today, server virtualization rates of 50 percent or more are increasingly common in well-run data centers. But a variety of service level challenges have kept most organizations from realizing the full benefits of virtualization for the applications that power their businesses,” he said.

Megee noted that from data protection to storage management, high availability and disaster recovery to endpoint virtualization, Symantec software helps customers protect and manage their physical and virtual information and infrastructure, which enable them to confidently virtualise even their most business-critical applications.

He disclosed that many organizations are moving applications such as MS SQL, MS Exchange, Oracle databases, and SAP to virtual platforms.

“Virtualization provides simple and robust infrastructure availability, but until now has lacked solutions to protect applications inside virtual machines,” he said, stressing that the recently announced ApplicationHA is the result of extensive collaboration between Symantec and VMware to help organizations accelerate the virtualization of business-critical applications while providing simple application-aware availability.

Equally commenting, the vice president, Global Strategic Alliances for VMware, Mr. Parag Patel said that the innovative solutions will enable customers improve their virtualization of their business-critical application.

“VMware and Symantec have built a strong partnership, and it’s exciting to see the results of our collaboration, including improved management of virtual environments and increased levels of security and availability,” he said, noting that the joint customers look to the partnership to help solve real-world problems through innovation, and they would continue to work together to achieve this.

As said by Mr. Magee, Symantec is also unveiling Symantec VirtualStore, a new solution designed to minimize storage costs in VMware environments.

“VirtualStore is a software-based NAS solution that scales servers and storage independently, efficiently provisions virtual machines, and delivers advanced storage optimization capabilities for VMware environments,” he said, explaining that VirtualStore was developed in collaboration with VMware and integrates VMware’s management tools such as VMware vCenter Server and VMware vMotion.

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