In an effort to drive businesses forward by using IT, Symantec has come up with agile data centre solutions. Tarun Kaura, Director Technology Sales, Symantec India, talks to Pupul Dutta about the company’s offerings and plans
What strategies should CIOs adopt to make their data centres more agile?
The dynamic IT scenario and the constant demand of Instant gratificationfrom customers are the factors pushing businesses to upgrade their systems. Mobility, Big Data, BYOD, etc., are playing a key role in enabling greater business agility.
IT in an enterprise is now intertwined with the business strategy; it is not treated as a separate entity. The CIOs/CTOs are taking a more proactive role in driving the business forward. For effectively managing the data deluge and making the data centres agile,the businesses need to undertake measures for data centre transformation, data centre consolidation, greenfield data centre construction and cloud adoption.
Symantec’s product portfolio gives an enterprise a holistic package that helps them strategise and make their data centres more agile. We have recently announced the latest version of NetBackup solution as well as the Storage Foundation (6.1).
Most data centres have been built in a pre-cloud era.
What are the best ways of upgrading these installations so that they can provide the kind of performance that is needed in the present times?
It is true that most data centers were designed in a pre-cloud era. A recent study by IDC of the APAC market shows that the need for increased mobility and security is making the CIOs and IT managers go in for a complete redesign of the legacy systems.
Around 29% of businesses are now moving towards a hybrid agile data center environment. While incorporating infrastructure expansion and renovation, it is essential to understand the different approaches to infrastructure build-out. This can range from building a new data centre, refreshing an existing data centre, or even moving to a cloud computing environment. The data centre ecosystem is dynamic and no two data centres are identical, they have the common objective of capturing, storing and presenting critical business information to end users in a secure and efficient manner.
What kind of solutions can be used by agile data centres to improve their security and efficiency?
The need of the hour for businesses is effective delivery of the right resources to the right users, and CIOs and architects are straining to achieve that outcome. We, at Symantec, offer agile data centres that can leverage Symantec? IT intelligence to stay backed up, and be resilient and safeguarded. The solutions that enable the agile data center are: NetBackup, which manages backups across heterogeneous environments and helps ensure that the service levels are elastic and scalable; Disaster Recovery Advisor, which complements high availability and disaster recovery solutions to help ensure that the business continuity plan will work when needed; Data Centre Security and Server & Server Advanced, which help in securing physical and virtual servers.
Give us an overview of the role that Symantec is playing in improving the efficiency of the data centers?
For a data centre to be efficient, it is imperative that the infrastructure is agile. The solution from Symantec is the effective orchestration layer for availability, security, storage, backup, archiving and governance services. We help IT organisations deliver resilient availability to the business with their choice of hypervisor technologies, while providing consistent and automated application-centric security across the physical and virtual server footprint. This enables heterogeneous storage resource pooling and dynamic provisioning regardless of operating system, storage or interconnects users across data centers. In addition, we help automate assessment of security controls across virtual and physical infrastructure. Symantec also helps organisations move toward a service delivery model by either delivering availability, security, storage, backup, governance or archiving directly to users as a service or embedding this functionality within broader service offerings.