Symantec Introduces High Availability/Disaster Recovery Platform

Veritas Cluster Server One architected for distributed applications running in virtual environments

• By James E. Powell
• 10/08/2008

Symantec Corp. today released Veritas Cluster Server One (VCS One), a high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) platform. Unlike traditional cluster-enabling technologies, VCS One moves helps IT managers implement advanced services such as active/active disaster recovery and scale-out control, helping data centers improve uptime and lowering capital and operational expenses.

Today’s data centers operate virtualized, distributed environments, but they tax many IT shops. Server virtualization lets data centers create thousands of servers, but according to Symantec, “traditional clustering solutions complicate or even prevent the use of valuable virtualization features like live migration.”

Symantec says that VCS One provides an HA/DR architecture “that not only directly addresses these issues, but also dramatically simplifies the deployment and ongoing management of HA/DR services.” The client/server-based VCS One architecture can scale to 256 nodes per cluster. It runs outside the O/S kernel so deployment and upgrades are easier.

VCS One uses policies to automate tasks using priorities and scheduling, as well as dependency management.

Veritas Cluster Server One earns its “one” label: it offers one platform for both virtual and physical environments. It uses one platform “for multi-tier and monolithic applications,” and “for scale-out and scale-up control.” Additional features include:

• Active/Active disaster recovery by combining virtualization control with application-priority policies, keeping the highest priority workloads available no matter what the outage scenario

• Multi-tier high availability HA that, unlike traditional downtime that requires considerable coordination among people and processes, uses application-dependency policies to minimize downtime “by coordinating restart relationships between distributed application components running on various operating systems and across physical and virtual platforms”

Veritas Cluster Server One, available now, is priced per CPU, beginning at $995. Additional information can be found at http://www.symantec.com