Symantec Releases Comprehensive Solution for High-Availability/Disaster Recovery Preparedness

Veritas CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor delivers rich knowledge base of configuration risks

Symantec Corp. today announced Veritas CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor, a software management tool for data center operations that increases productivity, proactively identifies availability risks, and lowers costs. Disaster Recovery Advisor furthers Symantec’s goal to help organizations efficiently secure and manage their information by expanding on Symantec’s high-availability and disaster-recovery (HA/DR) capabilities to identify configuration vulnerabilities in any data center and ensure applications can be recovered during an unplanned outage.

Disaster Recovery Advisor delivers a comprehensive assessment within two days of installation. This is made possible by an agentless architecture and zero configuration of its knowledge base with more than 3000 risk signatures. Disaster Recovery Advisor provides a comprehensive assessment through in-depth visibility into the application, server, and storage environment across all leading storage, server, and software solutions.

Proactive Risk Identification

An August 2008 survey by Symantec found that more than 30 percent of disaster recovery tests fail, leaving organizations susceptible to unknown configuration changes or “configuration drift.” Successful disaster recovery requires end-to-end monitoring and reporting of application, server, and storage configurations, and a flexible way to test HA/DR. Symantec’s solution proactively identifies hidden configuration risks that jeopardize the success of the businesses recovery.

“Our customers continually face the challenge of simplifying operations and cutting costs while ensuring the full recovery of their business in the event of a failure,” said Yogesh Agrawal, vice president of Symantec’s CommandCentral Product Group. “In large scale data centers, proactively identifying configuration risks without disrupting the business is so difficult that most organizations don’t do it. With Disaster Recovery Advisor, IT organizations can automatically detect thousands of such issues, understand the risk to their applications, servers, and storage and take action while efficiently leveraging existing IT resources.”

Extensive Knowledge Base

Disaster Recovery Advisor has an extensive knowledge base of thousands of vulnerabilities and critical issues -- nearly anything that may prevent a data center from recovering from an outage. This extensive knowledge base enables customers to identify availability risks in their environment within two days of installation. Installation of Disaster Recovery Advisor is quick and seamless; the solution is agentless and requires no configuration.

The knowledge base is continuously and automatically updated so HA/DR plans will be successful and IT organizations will be protected from the latest HA/DR issues as they are identified. For any identified risks, Disaster Recovery Advisor automates the remediation process by providing resolution guides that help fix the problem before performing much needed DR tests, saving time and other resources.

Comprehensive Support

As part of a successful HA/DR testing plan, Disaster Recovery Advisor supports the heterogeneous data center -- server, storage, and databases -- as well as leading clustering and storage management solutions. Disaster Recovery Advisor supports all major operating systems as well as the major storage arrays and databases, allowing data center managers to have confidence that they can utilize it in any data center environment.

Pricing and Availability

CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor is available now; pricing starts at $3,000 based on the number of physical servers monitored. Symantec is also offering a free risk assessment to help evaluate customers’ HA/DR preparedness.

More information is available at www.symantec.com.

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