There is tremendous interest in solid-state drives in the enterprise as they offer faster, cheaper and low-power alternatives to high speed drives. However, concerns linger over management and lifespan of the drives. Platter-based drives may be old but they are proven; SSDs are still new in the market. Slowly, products are emerging to support SSDs like a standard drive, and Symantec is one storage company leading the way.
Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) today announced a number of new tools to make better use of data storage resources, including new thin provisioning features and solid state drive (SSD) management.
The new features, delivered through the company’s Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server storage management and high availability products for Unix, Linux and Windows, also include integration with Microsoft Hyper-V and new database recovery features.
The Storage Foundation Solid State Drive Visibility feature offers SSD management in heterogeneous storage environments. It’s a capability that storage vendors like Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and EMC (NYSE: EMC) are working on because it sends only the most critical data to pricey SSDs.
Symantec’s Dynamic Storage Tiering technology can assign data to a storage tier based on policies such as age, type and usage, said Sean Derrington, the company’s director of storage management and availability. The namespace doesn’t change, so the data movement is invisible to end users and applications. Managing SSDs as a “tier 0” can speed performance by four to 12 times, said Derrington.
