Symantec offering enables data centres to adopt SSDs while leveraging existing storage investments

Symantec has announced a new version of its Storage Foundation software, enabling data centers to leverage Solid State Drives (SSDs) in ways that could allow customers to access mission critical data and applications 400 percent faster than traditional Storage Area Networks (SANs). It is also the only offering to provide these benefits regardless of which storage hardware components are in place. Customers as a result are free to choose any storage infrastructure provider, and businesses can make critical decisions faster.

The growth of mission-critical data and applications, supporting real-time decision-making, is driving SSD adoption to increase performance within the data center. Adoption however has lacked the central management intelligence that customers need to manage their storage efficiently and effectively. Symantec’s offering solves this problem while allowing customers to combine SSDs with existing Direct Attached Storage (DAS) and SANs without compromising availability.

New feature highlights
Storage Foundation 6.1 functionalities and benefits include:
· A vendor-agnostic intuitive caching layer, enabled by Symantec’s SmartIO technology. SmartIO detects critical application workloads and caches only the hot data on local SSDs, which could result in up to 400 percent improved performance over traditional secondary storage.
· Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) technology enables servers to access remote data as if it were from local storage. This allows organizations to reduce storage costs by up to 80 percent using commoditized storage hardware, while helping to ensure that all data is replicated, protected, and available.