Symantec's Storage Software To Support Red Hat Linux 5

Symantec, which has had a working partnership with Red Hat since 2003, will offer Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server and Veritas NetBackup solutions to Red Hat customers, and will also offer support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 within 90 days, said Laura Shepard, Linux product line manager.

In fact, Symantec most likely will be able to roll out support for the new Red Hat release before 90 days, Shepard noted. "This is important because some customers are early adopters, and the time line is especially critical to enterprise data center customers," she said.

Red Hat and Symantec are unveiling a joint effort to unite each company's front-line support systems and give engineers remote access to each company's virtual testing environments. In addition to providing high quality support in a timely manner, and providing cross-training for engineers, the effort will streamline the support response process, Shepard said.

"Our front-line and their front-line support can see the same trouble ticket at once, and if they can't resolve it, they can escalate it," said Shepard, adding that the goal is to have the same mature support trees as the older Unix-based operating systems.

Companies are gravitating to virtual environments for their smaller footprints and easy administration, and a diverse range of solutions are beginning to hit the market. With that in mind, Symantec is launching a beta program around its Storage Foundation and Dynamic Multipathing technologies that taps the benefits of open-source Xen virtualization technology bundled with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, according to Shepard.

In addition to being fast and secure, Xen virtualization software allows physical servers to handle multiple virtual servers without performance degradation, which is critical for ensuring application layer service levels.

"Many virtualization technologies allow you to put software and executables in user space only, which means you can't touch data access in I/O management. In Xen, you can put I/O where it affects access paths, which enables you to put multiple virtual servers on a single machine," she said.