Powering Linux® in the Data Center
Who should read this paper
Who should read this paper
Linux IT Architect and Director of IT for Linux Servers
Content
Symantec™ and Linux in the Data Center. . . 1
Proven Linux Success. . . 1
Enabling Wide-spread Adoption of Linux. . . 1
Symantec’s Linux Data Center Products . . . 1
Enterprise-grade Application Protection . . . 2
Greater Scale In Linux Environments . . . 2
Maximized Data Center Investment . . . 3
Case Study : NPD Group . . . 3
Case Study: Lotus Renault F1 . . . 4
Case Study: SESCAM. . . 4
A sample of leading data centers powered by Symantec Linux solutions . . . 5
Symantec™ and Linux in the Data Center
Many IT professionals are drawn by the savings that Linux® brings to the data center but are concerned about the potential uptime and data protection risks that arise from trusting their business-critical applications to "free" or native software. Native Linux solutions also prove challenging with required manual scripting and lack of automated operations and management. For business-critical data center applications, the complete line of Symantec high availability, data protection, backup and recovery, disaster recovery and storage management offerings deliver UNIX-class performance, scalability, administration, and support on Linux.
With a depth of trusted, high performance features and unmatched breadth of server and storage platform coverage, Symantec offers enterprise-class Linux solutions for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, SUSE® Linux, Oracle® Enterprise Linux, or others.
Symantec's data center solutions support all major Linux, UNIX® and Windows® platforms and provide a single-pane-of-glass centralized management approach to efficiently operate and manage these diverse environments. These offerings span disaster recovery, business continuity, server and storage management and advanced disk-based data protection across both physical and virtual environments for the Linux platform.
Proven Linux Success
Symantec's data center solutions have a proven track record on all major platforms, including Linux. The company's first Linux products were introduced over a decade ago. Today, Symantec offers its entire suite of data center-class products on the Linux platform and has more than 64,500 data center customer deployments on Linux worldwide1. With a significant Linux development effort on several continents, Symantec
has made valuable contributions to the Linux open source code base in the areas of performance, scalability and critical memory allocation enhancements.
Symantec's Linux solutions have been designed to offer the features and performance that enterprise-class organizations expect, with a common management toolset available across heterogeneous platforms and all major CPU architectures that run business-critical applications. With its world-class technical support and industry partnerships such as with Red Hat, Symantec is able to deliver the capabilities critical to the success of enterprise deployments.
Enabling Wide-spread Adoption of Linux
One of the biggest challenges of Linux deployment is transitioning data from old legacy platforms. Symantec products simplify the process with vendor-independent array migrations and unique features that make it easy to move data from one operating system platform to another, even when the processor architecture requires an endian conversion. After migration, all of the same features are available to manage your new platforms. And, if the requirement is to manage multiple platforms simultaneously, Symantec data center solutions enable that by spanning all major server and storage platforms to deliver the cost and control benefits of a standard set of tools.
Symantec’s Linux Data Center Products
Symantec offers a complete line of data management and protection offerings, for the following:
1-Based on a Symantec internal customer report, there are 64,950 customers using Symantec Availability and Management Solutions for their Linux data center worldwide. Data may vary or change without notice. (Data source as of Apr 30, 2012)
Enterprise-grade Application Pro
Enterprise-grade Application Protection
tection
Symantec helps organizations achieve enterprise-grade application protection making sure that their business-critical applications and associated data are always protected and in case of failure can recover faster to meet the most demanding Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Ensure maximum data and application availability across applications, hardware components, and data center locations without need for extensive and time-consuming scripting. Symantec provides enterprise-grade high availability and disaster recovery with instantaneous detection of failures along with sub-minute recovery of applications.
Protect globally deployed critical data across virtual and physical environments, to any storage tier, whether tape, disk, appliance, or cloud, automate and simplify management of backup and recovery tasks, and provide consistent, reliable system protection, all through a single, global data protection management console.
Enable non-disruptive storage and maintenance operations. Simplify the administration and management of heterogeneous environments and provide continuous availability for all business-critical applications.
• Veritas Storage Foundation™ High Availability from Symantec, including Veritas™ Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server™ from Symantec
• Veritas Storage Foundation™ Cluster File System from Symantec • Symantec NetBackup™ Platform
• Symantec™ ApplicationHA • Veritas™ Operations Manager
• Veritas™ Operations Manager Advanced
Greater Scale In Linux En
Greater Scale In Linux Environments
vironments
For organizations running parallel workload applications such as SAS, SAP®, Oracle® RAC, Tibco®, Informatica® etc on Linux platforms, scalability is an important factor. Organizations want to dynamically scale their environments depending on their business needs.
The Veritas™ Cluster File System from Symantec helps organizations resiliently scale out their parallel workload applications. Benefits include concurrent access to shared data while preventing data corruption, high availability of data even if a cluster node fails, and linear scalability for file access as nodes get added into a cluster.
Symantec offers organizations comprehensive global disaster recovery solutions. We help organizations simplify by using a single solution for local high availability, campus or metro disaster recovery as well as wide area or global disaster recovery. The automated disaster recovery features helps reduce reliance on personnel during an incident and also provides non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans to help organizations data centers stay prepared.
Most organizations have multi-tiered applications and services. Virtual Business Services within Veritas Operations Manager provides enhanced visibility and a single control point across these multi-tiered applications and services, covering both physical and virtual platforms. This eliminates difficulties of managing complex applications.
• Storage Foundation Cluster File System • Cluster Server
• ApplicationHA
Powering Linux® in the Data Center
• Operations Manager
• Operations Manager Advanced
Maximized Data Center Investment
Symantec provides cost effective solutions and technologies to help organizations keep their operational and capital expenditures down. Keep storage spend to a minimum by avoiding getting locked-in to a single storage vendor. Symantec solutions support storage hardware from multiple vendors so organizations can reduce their storage costs with freedom to choose any storage.
Optimize data storage to a greater extent compared to storage optimization rates forecasted by storage vendors. Symantec provides a multitude of storage optimization technologies to help you optimize the storage you already have and defer future storage spend. Symantec also helps you get thin and stay thin. We offer technologies like deduplication, thin reclamation, compression, point-in-time snapshots, and integrated snapshot and replication management across the entire backup infrastructure.
Veritas File System from Symantec, that forms the base of Cluster File System, performs faster than native Linux file systems like Ext3 and Ext4. It delivers higher Transactions/second with a higher Response Time as well as optimal CPU utilization with linear Powering Linux® in the Data Center.
Transactions/second scalability. Better performance lets organizations maximize resource utilization effectively since it results in higher workload density, thus less hardware is needed.
• Storage Foundation
• Storage Foundation™ Cluster File System • Dynamic Multi-Patihng
• NetBackup™ Platform
Symantec is committed to bringing enterprise-class support to Linux. Our Consulting Services provides the expertise to make enterprise Linux deployment a success, with proven methods and best practices that leverage our breadth of experience and depth of certified resources. Support centers around the globe are ready to assist with any problems or questions-24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Joint escalation processes are in place with many Linux partners to provide fast problem resolution.
Case Study : NPD Group
Enhanced visibility into a multivendor, multiplatform server and storage environment, as well as concurrent access to shared storage in a distributed environment.
NPD Group, Inc. processes about 100 terabytes of data each week for customers. NPD Group's customers, including many Fortune 500 customers represent 150,000 retail locations globally.
Challenge: Key challenges that NPD Group faced were gaining visibility into how storage was being used, to optimize tiering and utilization,
reducing their reliance on spreadsheets and manual storage management tasks, and maintaining application performance and availability while controlling costs.
Solution: In order to meet its business-critical goals, NPD Group chose Cluster File System, Operations Manager Advanced, and Storage
Foundation High Availability.
Results: Benefits include 99.999 percent availability for NPD Group's business-critical data analysis application. They were also able to
discover close to 100 percent of 2 data centers with a single tool, got x24 faster reporting on their storage and cluster environments and now have just 2 full-time employees managing 1.5PB of SAN storage in a multi-vendor environment. They also reduced risk of storage
management errors when selecting storage at the system level and have saved 200 hours per year for their storage administrator by automating tasks.
Case Study: Lotus Renault F1
World-class data management solutions to manage data growth and spearhead the move to cloud, virtual and mobile computing
Motorsports are unique. Most businesses are measured on revenue or stock performance. The success of a racing team is judged by what happens on 1 of 19 ribbons of tarmac. To win on race day, Lotus Renault GP needs all the data associated with winning races at its fingertips – quickly and reliably.
Challenge: Lotus Renault needed data protection in their state-of-the-art data center in Enstone across their Red Hat, SUSE Linux, UNIX and
Microsoft Windows environments, the data in the Oracle databases, and the email and files in Microsoft Exchange™.
Solution: In order to meet its high-performance, heterogeneous data protection needs, Lotus Renault chose NetBackup Platform. Results: Lotus chose NetBackup as a key pillar in the Team's disaster recovery and business continuity strategy nearly a decade ago.
Leveraging NetBackup's integrated deduplication, they realized savings of $180,000 each year in reduced data center costs arising from library downsizing, 77 percent reduction in media costs from 260 tapes to 60 tapes per year, and the reduced building space needed for fewer fireproof safes. Deduplication significantly improved backup performance by reducing the backup volume by 32 percent from 22 terabytes (TB) to 15TB per day and allowed them to more efficiently manage storage growth. "In the next three years, we don't intend to throw disk at the problem of data growth. It's more about intelligently managing growth using deduplication."
Case Study: SESCAM
Storage Management, High Availability, Data Protection, Remote Backup, and Data Deduplication
Servicio de Salud de Castilla–La Mancha (SESCAM) delivers healthcare services to the residents of Castilla–La Mancha, one of the 17 autonomous communities (regional governments) of Spain.
Challenge: Key challenges that SESCAM needed to overcome were providing near-instantaneous information access and high availability of
medical information and maximizing value of infrastructure investment in regards to servers and storage hardware while scaling to accommodate rapid growth in data volume. Additionally, consolidating data protection for remote facilities was another key challenge.
Solution: SESCAM chose Storage Foundation, Cluster Server, NetBackup and Symantec™ NetBackup PureDisk.
Results: NetBackup centralized backups in SESCAM's main data center. SESCAM has realized IT labor productivity gains ranging from
$50,838 in 2004 to $684,000 in 2010. From Jan 2004 through Dec 2010, total IT labor productivity gains were $2,367,624. Deploying NetBackup PureDisk allowed SESCAM to eliminate local backups for 50 sites in 2009 and 250 sites in 2010 and 2011. The cost avoidance totaled $767,300. Labor productivity gains from Storage Foundation were expected to amount to $459,271 for the period from Jan 2005 through Dec 2010. By deploying clusters as active–passive using Cluster Server's N+1 technology, the institution avoided buying more than 100 servers. The cost benefit was projected to total $4,410,692 from Jan 2004 through Dec 2010.
Powering Linux® in the Data Center
For any of these stories, check out the complete story at:http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/solutions/successes/.
A sample of leading data centers powered by Symantec Linux solutions
• HD Supply
• Ningbo Municipal Yinzhou District No.2 Hospital
For more information on how these customers use our technologies to extend the business value of their technologies, please visit:
http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/solutions/successes/.
Learn more
To find out how Symantec can simplify Linux management and enhance information availability in your data centers and across your enterprise. Visitgo.symantec.com/linux.
