SCCyberworld

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Symantec and VMware Accelerate Business Critical Virtualisation and Help Customers and Partners Confidently Transition to the Cloud


Symantec now offers more than 100 integrations with VMware cloud infrastructure 

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – 29 August, 2012 – Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) today announced new solutions and technical integrations with VMware across its product portfolio to provide higher levels of protection for virtualised environments. Together, Symantec and VMware enable SMBs and enterprises to use the benefits of virtualisation without compromising protection. 

IT administrators are seeking flexible solutions to help accelerate virtualisation as a first step in moving toward a cloud service delivery model. Symantec can address this transition with leading solutions now tightly integrated with VMware cloud infrastructure. As companies move business critical applications from physical to virtual, Symantec can help to:

#Provide deeper visibility and control of virtual applications
#Reduce impact on performance due to backup and recovery operations while increasing protection effectiveness
#Execute high performance security and compliance trusted across virtual and cloud infrastructures
Improve application storage performance and availability

Alex Ong, Country Director of Symantec Malaysia

“Symantec and VMware are jointly innovating to help customers globally including in Malaysia accelerate the move to the cloud with confidence. Symantec’s deep integration with VMware enables companies to take advantage of the productivity of virtualisation and the cloud without compromising protection,” said Alex Ong, country director of Symantec Malaysia. 

He added, “It’s important for businesses in Malaysia to make the most of their current infrastructure as IT budgets are shrinking. Fortunately, however, leveraging virtual infrastructure to enable cloud computing is possible without having to rip and replace the entire infrastructure. Symantec and VMware have teamed up to help businesses make the transition to virtualisation as smoothly as possible.”

“The integration with VMWare goes beyond simply enabling the technologies to work together. We have developed various integration levels ranging from technical API’s to best practice policy content to process workflows that automate redundant manual tasks. We’re providing these benefits in today’s most important technology areas, including storage, high availability, backup, security and compliance,” Ong said.

Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s senior vice president, Cloud Infrastructure Products, said, “Symantec demonstrates an ongoing and consistent commitment to supporting VMware cloud infrastructure and provides valuable resources for organisations looking to expand their virtual environments and move to public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Smart integrations in security, backup and storage solutions create an opportunity for organisations to securely pursue the benefits of virtualisation and cloud computing.”

Backup, Recovery and Archiving
Symantec Backup Exec and Symantec NetBackup help organisations of all sizes make the shift to virtualisation faster, easier and smoother by giving IT administrators the agility and confidence to automate further and faster. By archiving and offloading stale data, Enterprise Vault enables customers to further reduce their data center footprint and scale the applications and systems that are targeted for virtualisation.

NetBackup 7.6, scheduled to release later this year, plans to include NetBackup Accelerator now for VMware cloud infrastructure that provides up to 100 times faster backup while new NetBackup Instant Recovery for VMware cloud infrastructure will recover virtual machines 800 times faster. Planned new features for VMware vCloud Director and VMware vCenter Server will make management and automation even easier.

The Backup Exec 2012 V-Ray Edition gives virtualisation architects industry-leading Backup Exec protection technology across mixed physical and VMware environments. This unified platform consolidates backup and restore efforts, eliminating the management problems inherent to point solutions.

Enterprise Vault, which is VMware Ready certified, helps customers scale their physical and virtual environments by managing and migrating old and stale data into the archive and reclaiming primary storage capacity. Enterprise Vault can be virtualised and is optimised for VMware vSphere and VMware View, providing seamless interoperability within a virtualised infrastructure.

As virtualisation evolves to private clouds and customers begin adopting a multi-hypervisor strategy, IT organisations can no longer rely on point products to meet their data protection needs. “Organisations small and large need a holistic protection strategy, a single platform or solution, to handle the variety of data types and workloads as opposed to integrating a number of disparate point solutions, which proves to be costly and time consuming,” said Dave Russell, vice president of Storage Technologies and Strategies, Gartner. 

Security and Compliance
By closely integrating with VMware cloud infrastructure, Symantec security solutions enable joint customers to efficiently protect their virtual and cloud infrastructure and business-critical applications with data loss prevention, IT risk and compliance, improved threat monitoring and intelligence and optimised protection of virtualised endpoints and data centers. 

To protect virtual data centers against advanced threats, Symantec Critical System Protection now supports VMware vSphere 5 with granular, policy-based controls to protect and monitor the hypervisor, guest virtual machines and VMware vCenter Server. The solution enables organisations to identify server compliance violations and suspicious activity in real-time, limit administrative control, restrict network communications and prevent file and configuration tampering of the virtual infrastructure, all as recommended in the VMware Hardening Guidelines. To reduce both compliance and security risk, Symantec Control Compliance Suite allows users to automate their compliance assessment and reporting processes, enabling them to identify risk and prioritise remediation activities across both physical and virtual infrastructure. Symantec Security Information Manager (SSIM) and Symantec's Managed Security Service (MSS) both leverage the VMware vShield log management collector to augment an organisation’s ability to identify and respond to security threats that impact business critical applications across both their physical and virtual infrastructures. 

Symantec also has an active beta program underway to finalise new features for Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 which includes VMware vShield Endpoint integration to deliver additional deployment options for improved performance. The upcoming release will offload critical security analysis from protected virtual machines to a dedicated security virtual appliance resulting in optimised scan performance, reduced resource utilisation, and increased management visibility.

Storage and Availability Management
By using Symantec’s storage management and high availability platform within VMware environments, customers can confidently virtualise all their applications and move to the cloud with full support for application availability, better storage visibility, powerful storage optimisation and the ability to bridge the gap between physical and virtual environments. 

The new release of Symantec’s Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware cloud infrastructure integrates directly into VMware vCenter Server and adds support for VMware vSphere 5 and planned support for VMware vSphere 5.1. Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware 6.0 helps organisations improve SAN storage input/output (I/O) performance and availability for VMware vSphere. In addition, Dynamic Multi-Pathing provides deeper visibility into the underlying storage, enabling views from applications in virtual machines to storage spindle and gathering performance statistics to enable better decision-making.

Symantec is also announcing the beta version of its market leading Cluster Server solution targeting the VMware platform to provide organisations with reliable high availability and disaster recovery for applications running in virtual infrastructures. Symantec is the only provider to substantially minimise planned and unplanned downtime for mission critical applications such as Oracle, SAP, Exchange, SQL Server and Apache that are running in a virtual world. The new solution will provide automatic application failover between VMware virtual machines ensuring faster application recovery without compromising VMware advanced capabilities like VMware vMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler. Symantec’s Cluster Server can be managed directly through VMware vCenter Server to simplify operations.  

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