Vision 2011: Symantec boosts private cloud deployments with Veritas refresh

BARCELONA: IT teams should build their own scalable and cost-effective private clouds with existing infrastructure, helping the business do more with less in economically challenging times, according to Symantec chief executive and president Enrique Salem.

Chief information officers are increasingly being squeezed from all sides, Salem explained in his opening keynote.

"The chief executives want them to be more agile and responsive, the business units don't feel they have the right level of support and their budgets have been pushed to the limit to do more with less," he said.

"Business as usual will not work, so there needs to be a rethink of current IT environments."

Cloud computing will be the "biggest change to IT in the last 30 years", according to Salem, but can represent a challenge to IT teams.

"Our goal is that you can use your current infrastructure to build private, highly scalable, highly cost-effective private clouds with what you currently have," he said.

"Private cloud is an efficient way of using infrastructure - storage and servers - in a more effective way and delivering that as a service to your company. It makes you more agile and it's cost effective. These are things that IT wants."

In order to support this, Symantec has launched major upgrades to its storage management products, including Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0, Veritas Cluster Server 6.0 and Veritas Operations Manager 4.1.

Anil Chakravarthy, senior vice president of Symantec's Storage and Availability Management Group, demonstrated on stage how the updated portfolio and one of its core components, the new Veritas Business Service, enables companies to manage business services end to end across disparate platforms.

Version 6.0 of the products also allow IT teams to deploy resilient, elastic storage for cloud workloads and reduce the storage footprint thanks to deduplication and other technologies.