To support SMBs looking to virtualize their environments, Symantec has launched a Virtualization Clinic where SMBs can take an assessment and get recommendations and guidelines on next steps. The assessment will help SMBs gauge the level of maturity of their virtualization strategy and their ambition to further implement the technology. The clinic will also include information for SMBs implementing, or looking to implement virtualization, to help simplify the complexity of virtualization.

Below are a few links to items that I think you may find useful:
• SMB Virtualization Clinic
• Virtualization Assessment
• Infographic
• Demystifying Virtualization for Small Businesses

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced enhancements to Symantec FileStore N8300, the latest version of its clustered, network attached storage appliance, designed to help customers address the business challenges associated with building out virtual environments and cloud storage, managing large volumes of data and controlling the associated storage costs. Certified with VMware, FileStore N8300 is seamlessly integrated with VMware vCenter Server, and enables organizations to optimize storage costs associated with virtual machine sprawl and rapidly provision servers and virtual desktops, through efficient cloning and de-duplication of virtual machine images.

The NAS storage market, especial the clustered NAS market is growing at 10%+ as per IDC.

The main new features of the FileStore N8300 are:

• Virtualization: –Support for efficient cloning and storage of VMware images –Integrated with vCenter and is VMware certified
• De-duplication: –Primary block-based storage de-duplication –Leverages recent Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0 code
• Robustness: –Enhancements to replication and failover capabilities Added automated failover capabilities.  The product always had replication support and has added autofailover to a secondary site and synchronous replication within 100 km and cascading replication across locations.

There has been an enormous growth in unstructured data.  Organizations don’t just need lots of storage, they need storage management and business continuity built in so that storage can be more usable.  Scalability, performance, high availability, management, governance, anti-virus, are all necessary.  AV is embedded on the unit itself.  This is where a lot of Symantec software products come together to provide a full portfolio of NAS services.

Built on commodity hardware in order to keep costs low.  More than 600,000 IOPS using 8 off the shelf units.

Regarding virtualization, each VM has a golden image taken, using FastClone they can clone thousands of virtual machines in 20 minutes, only cloning new information so this is more efficient in terms of storage and time.  Over time, the clones digress from each other so this is where dedupe becomes important.  It’s possible to add more compute or storage nodes to tune performance.  There’s also caching capability to prevent boot storms (when everyone logs in at once in the morning).  VCenter console can be used to managed the FileStore device so administrators can stay within one interface instead of jumping around.

Sold as a joint solution with Enterprise Vault so that storage and archive comes as one.

In order to reduce backup windows, NetBackup SAN client can take data off of one unit and blast it onto another unit without needed to go from file store to file server, which is 5 to 10 times faster.

Symantec allows customers to back up to cloud storage (which is FileStore in the cloud with services built on it).  Or customers can put their own FileStore in the cloud somewhere and back up to it.

Price varies greatly with configuration, based on the number of compute and storage nodes, the type of physical storage, the amount of storage.

There are a lot of great reasons to use the cloud for storage; anywhere, anytime, any-device access to your information is a great advantage for those of us not chained to a desk(top). But there are so many different services, how could anyone know which one to pick?

I’ve gone through a lot of the offerings out there and made some attempt to categorize them into business or consumer. Then I weeded out the fly-by-night file sharing sites which are more of a way to pirate music than store it. Then I scoured the web for reviews of the sites (it might have taken less time to review some of these myself) and again eliminated a bunch of services that had widespread complaints.

One aspect of cloud storage that I find particularly interesting is the commoditization of hardware, software, and the services built on top of them. Because the prices on the hardware and the bandwidth have come down so much in the past 5 years (it would have been unthinkable to save music on some server out there on the Internet 10 years ago), the cloud storage market has grown dramatically.

This commoditization makes sense if you think about it. Hard drives themselves have decreased in price to where you could get a terabyte SATA drive for $70. Granted, we’re talking about much larger scale than a single drive, but you could buy a 3u rack mountable server with 24 multi-terabyte drives in it for under $6,000. I remember that on my first server I installed a 100 MB (MB, not GB!) drive for $1500, plus we needed 2 to run RAID 0. Just looking at those numbers, it’s easy to see how the hardware commoditization has driven down the price of cloud storage.

In order to test my theory, I spoke with Brent Miller of ZT Systems, a reputable commodity server manufacturer. I shared my theory with Brent and asked him what he thought of it. His immediate response was, “You just might be right. For a long time everyone was talking about using the cloud for processing large volumes of data. Lately, we’re seeing a lot of action around cloud storage. One of our most popular build outs is a 2u storage server packed with 2 SSDs and 24 hard drives.”

So, I wasn’t that far off with my theory. I thought the most popular configuration would be a 3u server, but I’m off by a u!



MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – July 6, 2011 – Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced the availability of  Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 as well as results from independent tests demonstrating that the product outperforms the competition in both virtual and physical environments, providing unrivaled protection and blazingly fast performance. According to Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report, attackers unleashed more than 286 million distinct malicious programs in 2010, creating a challenge for traditional signature-based security solutions that can’t keep up with this volume of attacks. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition are now available  to combat the sheer volume of sophisticated attacks targeting organizations of all sizes today.

Click to Tweet: Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 scans 50% faster & protects better than competitors in virtual environs: http://bit.ly/kc1aqk

Symantec engaged with a number of well-known third-party testing organizations to benchmark Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 against competing products in the areas of protection and performance.  These tests evaluated products in both virtual environments, particularly highly consolidated virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments, as well as physical environments. Recent testing performed by Dennis Labs demonstrates that Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 running in a VDI environment defended against more real-world threats than comparable solutions from McAfee and Trend Micro. In addition, The Tolly Group measured the performance of these solutions in VDI environments, determining that Symantec completes an on-demand scan in about half the time with 49 percent less disk bandwidth when compared to solutions from McAfee and Trend Micro.  In addition, Symantec Endpoint Protection required 20 percent less disk bandwidth when performing on-access scanning compared to Trend Micro’s agentless DeepSecurity solution.

In real-world security tests performed by AV-Test.org in physical environments, Symantec protected better than comparable solutions from Kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft, Sophos and Trend Micro.  In recent Passmark Software Performance Benchmarks, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 performed faster than competing solutions from Kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft, Sophos and Trend Micro. Passmark conducted  the same evaluation for Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition against comparable solutions from ESET, Kaspersky, McAfee and Trend Micro; again, Symantec received the top performance scores.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 12:  To provide unmatched protection against today’s sophisticated threat landscape, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 uses Insight, Symantec’s award-winning community and cloud-based reputation technology, to detect and block new threats earlier and more accurately than any other corporate security product. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 also leverages Insight to reduce the overhead of virus scanning by as much as 70 percent by automatically identifying and whitelisting Symantec-trusted high-reputation files, eliminating significant scanning activity from each endpoint. In addition, SONAR, the world’s first hybrid behavioral-reputation engine, monitors running applications for suspicious behaviors to block zero-day and highly targeted threats in real-time.  Symantec’s intrusion prevention system (IPS) technology blocks attacks at the network layer, before they can do damage to a computer.  Together, these technologies make Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 the fastest, most effective, corporate endpoint security product on the market.

Optimized for performance on virtual systems, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 can automatically identify and manage virtual machines (VMs).  Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 also integrates directly with VMware’s security APIs to scan for malware inside offline VMware images. To alleviate concurrent scans, known as ‘AV Storms,’ from impacting performance in dense virtual environments, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 whitelists baseline VM images and shares scan results across VMs so that identical files only need to be scanned once across an entire pool.  When combined with the scanning elimination from Insight, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 enables faster, more responsive host systems, which in turn supports greater density of virtual instances, particularly for highly consolidated VDI environments.

Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition: Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition employs the same Insight, SONAR and IPS technologies to offer enterprise-class threat detection technologies and performance improvements for small business customers. With simple-to-use features such as an installation wizard, pre-configured policy settings and automated notifications and reports, Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition meets smaller organizations’ needs with the fastest, most effective anti-malware capabilities in the industry. Small businesses will have peace of mind that their data is safe from cybercriminals, so that they can stay focused on growing their businesses.

Security for Any Size:  Symantec provides a broad portfolio of flexible solutions to meet the varying needs of companies of all sizes—from the largest enterprises to small businesses. For mid- to large-sized organizations, Symantec offers Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 for on-premise deployment.  Symantec also offers the Symantec Protection Suite Enterprise Edition which includes messaging security and Web security along with backup and recovery capabilities. For smaller organizations, Symantec offers both cloud-based and on-premise solutions with Symantec Endpoint Protection.cloud and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition, giving customers with flexible deployment options to best meet their business needs.  Free trial versions are available:

•     Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 Trial

•     Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition Trial

•     Symantec Endpoint Protection.cloud Trial

Switch to Symantec:  Small and medium organizations currently using a competing endpoint security product may qualify for discounted pricing on Symantec Endpoint Protection 12. Symantec customers with a current maintenance contract are entitled to upgrade to Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 at no additional cost.  Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition are now available for purchase through Symantec’s worldwide network of value-added authorized resellers, distributors and systems integrators or directly.

Symantec Security Framework:  Symantec Endpoint Protection is part of the Symantec Security Framework, a portfolio of security products and services that enable organizations to counter emerging threats, support new computing models and simplify security management. Symantec’s portfolio of security products and services allow organizations to pursue innovations – such as mobile, cloud and virtual computing models. By providing relevant, actionable security intelligence and simultaneously simplifying security management, businesses can increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of their security posture.