Simplified storage management. Efficient use of existing resources. Cost and complexity reduction. These are all top-of-mind issues for today’s large enterprises, and Symantec is moving to address these issues by combining its just-enhanced Veritas Storage Foundation and its Thin Reclamation API industry standard.
With support for Windows, Unix and Linux, Storage Foundation offers thin optimization functionality that Symantec said fully automates storage optimization in thin environments to eliminate waste and ensure only the physical storage that’s needed is allocated to support real application data.
“Using thin provisioning capabilities to both reclaim capacity and to minimize overall storage usage can easily save enterprise data centers hundreds of thousands of dollars or more each year, and, as such, these tools should be strongly considered by any organization that has not yet adopted them,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. “Moreover, users can gain further benefit by seeking integrated, cross-platform management solutions that will help them with the migration and storage reclamation across their heterogeneous networks.”
A Focus on Thin
In addition to previously announced support from 3PAR, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM, Symantec also announced that Compellent, EMC, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard and NetApp have added support for its industry standard Thin Reclamation API. The API makes possible automated space reclamation for thin provisioning storage arrays in heterogeneous environments.
Symantec’s moves are timely. A recent storage study from TheInfoPro reveals that thin provisioning became more than twice as likely to be a top initiative for Fortune 1000 storage professionals over the last six months. Thin provisioning is a storage array-based technology to efficiently provision storage on demand to applications and maximize storage utilization.
“Organizations are looking to improve storage utilization in their mission-critical environments by implementing solutions that can provision, pool and reassign storage capacity as needed,” said Chris Powers, director of the StorageWorks…