I have been working for Symantec for more years than I care to remember. I joined through the Veritas acquisition some 6 years ago. In that time the datacenter has changed incredibly, before joining Veritas I was a systems administrator, this was long before the concept of SANs were mainstream and most UNIX systems simply had direct attached storage. I think it’s fair to say that at some point over the past 10 years the datacenter began transitioning from physical to virtual and we at Symantec were very guilty of not adapting our solutions quickly enough. We went on selling our traditional clustering and storage management tools which while they have always been best of breed weren’t necessarily a good fit in virtual environments. Thankfully due to the strength of our portfolio our product team began to reinvest into adapting our solutions specifically into the virtual space. The upshot is now although there is still much development and innovation under way we have a great portfolio to meet the needs of the modern data centre. Our SAMG solutions provide highly available solutions protecting multi tiered applications across metropolitan and Disaster Recovery Scenarios spread across all the major OS platofroms. Regardless of whether you are using KVM or LPARs, HDS or EMC, ISCSI or Block storage, HyperV or Vmware we are the only player who can integrate a truly heterogeneous datacenter and provide end to end automation for storage management and High Availability.

In the new world the products where we are seeing the most traction is Application HA and VDMP (multipathing for the ESX Hypervisor) Application HA provides application availability within virtual Vmware machines. Vdmp is our solution to multipathing in the ESX hypervisor providing the reliability and performance of Dynamic Multipathing in the Vmware world. Customers are seeing that by using Vdmp it gives unparalleled visibility into vmware storage environments as well as granular performance statistics to help deal with  the inevitable performance issues that consolidation creates. Couple this with a price tag far below that of Powerpath and the ability to consume Vdmp through models like XSP(pay monthly) it seems to resonate really well with service providers and the like. In our forthcoming release of VCS we will offer full application failover across Vmware virtual machines which will deliver the highest level of availability yet.  As Andy Dufresne says in the Shawshank Redemption “get busy living or get busy dying” I am pleased to say our Storage and availability Group is getting busy living..