Symantec Transforms Data Centre Operations with Comprehensive Solution for HA/DR Preparedness

Veritas CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor delivers value in less than two days with rich knowledgebase of configuration risks


JOHANNESBURG, South Africa. – April 8, 2009 – Symantec Corp. announced Veritas CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor, a software management tool that transforms data centre operations by increasing productivity, proactively identifying availability risks and lowering costs. Disaster Recovery Advisor furthers Symantec’s goal to help organisations efficiently secure and manage their information by expanding on Symantec’s market leading high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) capabilities to identify configuration vulnerabilities in any data centre and ensure applications can be recovered in the event of an unplanned outage.

Disaster Recovery Advisor delivers value quickly with a comprehensive assessment available within two days of installation. This is made possible by an agentless architecture and zero configuration of its knowledgebase 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 Ensures Successful HA/DR
An August 2008 survey from Symantec found that more than 30 percent of disaster recovery tests fail as organisations remain 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. With Disaster Recovery Advisor, Symantec is delivering a comprehensive solution to proactively identify hidden configuration risks, which jeopardise 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 Sheldon Hand, storage specialist at Symantec. “In large scale data centres, proactively identifying configuration risks without disrupting the business is so difficult that most organisations don’t do it. With Disaster Recovery Advisor, IT organisations 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.”

Two days to value with extensive knowledgebase and agentless capabilities
Disaster Recovery Advisor has the industry’s most extensive knowledgebase of thousands of vulnerabilities and critical issues—nearly anything that may prevent a data centre from recovering from an outage. This extensive knowledgebase enables customers to identify availability risks in their environment within two days of installation.  Installation of Disaster Recovery Advisor is quick and seamless, as the solution is agentless and requires zero configuration.

The knowledgebase is continuously and automatically updated, to ensure that HA/DR plans will be successful and IT organisations 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 Enables Recovery and Cost Savings
As part of a successful HA/DR testing plan, Disaster Recovery Advisor supports the heterogeneous data centre – server, storage and databases. It also supports the 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 centre managers to have confidence that they can utilise it in any data centre environment.

Disaster Recovery Advisor is the latest offering in Symantec’s storage and availability management portfolio and further delivers on Symantec’s goal to transform data centre operations by increasing productivity, proactively identifying risks, and lowering costs. In an effort to help customers more efficiently secure and manage their information, Symantec recently announced Veritas Operations Services, an online services platform to identify hidden risks and drive productivity and availability.

Pricing and Availability
CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor is generally available with pricing starting at approximately R27,500 based on the number of physical servers that are being monitored. Symantec is also offering a free risk assessment to help evaluate customers’ HA/DR preparedness.

Facts
•    According to research conducted by Symantec in 2008:

o    One-third (30 percent) of organisations have to execute a disaster recovery plan each year, yet only 47 percent say they could have 100 percent normal operations within one week?
o    30 percent of disaster recovery tests fail and one-third (32 percent) of organisations report that testing will impact their customers, and one-fifth (21 percent) admit such testing could impact their organisation’s sales and revenue?
o    43 percent of organisations report that they feel exposed to configuration change management issues?