* Symantec serves up storage-as-a-service
Symantec, like other vendors such as EMC, has recently started talking about delivering storage-as-a-service.
Last week we talked to Kris Hagerman, Symantec’s group president of data center management about the company’s view of storage-as-a-service. Here’s what he said:
“The way that we see IT evolving is that increasingly storage and many of the key capabilities of IT are going to be delivered as a service, whether you call it IT service management or real-time infrastructure or utility computing or the adaptive enterprise,” says Hagermann.
“Despite what you call it, the fundamental concepts are very similar,” says Hagermann. “You take these different capabilities that are delivered whether that’s storage or server management or security and they are viewed as things that have to be always on, always performing; they have to always be able to be tracked and measured so that they can meet different service levels by different application owners.
“One of the things we’ve seen over time and it’s not unique to storage, is that there is a gap between the business owners and the infrastructure team,” says Hagermann.
“The business application owners will say here is how much storage I need right away and I need the very highest performing storage you have. There’s often no accountability or repercussions for asking for that storage. It turns out when you start delivering things like a service and track them and in some cases charge for them, lo and behold, behavior changes. Instead of just asking for the very highest performing storage for everything you’re doing, you will now make decisions on the type of storage you want.”
Symantec’s storage-as-a-service initiative has four pillars:
– Understanding your current environment.
– Drive up utilization.
– Improve your operations.
– Deliver storage-as-a-service.
The crux of storage-as-a-service for Symantec is its recently introduced Storage United initiative. Storage United provides a software-oriented approach to unite diverse storage platforms, isolated islands of storage administration and storage operations with the business objectives of a company and allow customers to deliver storage-as-a-service.
