Symantec Adds SSD Support to Hybrid Storage Management

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Now that solid-state disks (SSDs) are starting to achieve some critical mass in the enterprise, the next big challenge is figuring out how to manage them. Rather than deploying dedicated software to manage SSDs, many organizations would simply prefer to extend the storage management software they have in place to include those SSDs.

Rising to that requirement, Symantec today released updates to its heterogeneous storage management software that allows organizations to mix and match SSDs and magnetic storage systems as they see fit.

According to Arun Balakrishnan, senior product marketing manager for Symantec information availability, version 6.1 of Symantec Storage Foundation, which is part of the Symantec 4.0 strategy that company CEO Steve Bennett launched earlier this year, also provides support for an intelligent caching layer, which caches the hot data that is associated with an organization’s most important application workloads on an SSD.

By enabling organizations to treat SSDs like any other piece of shared storage, Balakrishnan notes that Symantec is also reducing the total cost of adopting SSDs across multiple application workloads by as much as 20 percent, while increasing application performance by as much as a factor of four.

Balakrishnan says that organizations need an approach that allows them to layer in Flash memory technologies in the form of SSDs over an extended period of time, because most can’t afford to rip and replace all their expensive storage area networks (SANs). The Symantec approach is designed to accomplish that in a way that gives the IT organizations maximum control over which vendors get to participate in that transition both now and in the future.