Symantec Introduces Data Center Foundation

Market Wire, May, 2006

Symantec Vision 2006 -- Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) today announced the only integrated solution that enables enterprises to standardize on a consistent software infrastructure across heterogeneous application, database, server and storage platforms. The Symantec Data Center Foundation incorporates Veritas NetBackup, Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Server Foundation and Veritas i3 application performance management, and leverages a common integration platform across the product families. Enterprises will be able to replace dozens of different tools with the Symantec Data Center Foundation, enabling protection and availability of critical information and applications, improved utilization of storage and server hardware assets, and enhanced visibility and control of complex data center environments.

The need for a better approach to manage the data center infrastructure is clear: the demands on data centers are growing dramatically, budgets and staff levels are essentially flat, and data centers are becoming so complex, they are virtually unmanageable. With the Symantec Data Center Foundation, Symantec plans to provide a comprehensive range of critical technologies -- data protection and data management, storage tiering, server and storage consolidation, data migration, storage capacity management, server automation, application availability, and disaster recovery -- designed to help IT take proactive control of the data center, drive down costs and increase service levels.

"DHL serves more than 220 countries across the globe and our IT infrastructure must be reliable and efficient to support these operations. As a result of our growth, our data center environment has grown increasingly complex, and at the same time, information availability is more crucial than ever to our IT operations," said Gary Clark, CTO and head of infrastructure services, DHL. "Standardizing on Symantec data center management products has helped us reduce cost and complexity to create a more agile IT infrastructure, while ensuring the availability of our mission critical data and applications."

Virtually every data center uses equipment from a variety of different storage and server hardware vendors, and these vendors each provide tools to manage their own platforms. Unfortunately, the natural result is a proliferation of inconsistent tools and approaches. The Symantec Data Center Foundation provides a single set of market leading solutions that enables companies to simplify their data centers, actively manage and optimize their diverse storage and server assets, and deliver enhanced IT service levels that not only support the business, but actually drive competitive advantage.

"Data centers today are at the breaking point -- complexity has run out of control, driving costs up and jeopardizing service levels," said Kris Hagerman, senior vice president of the data center management group at Symantec Corporation. "The Symantec Data Center Foundation is the only infrastructure solution that gives customers the best of both worlds -- the ability to standardize on a single infrastructure software platform across their entire data center, while leveraging product offerings that are each best-in-class market leaders to drive optimal utilization of valuable hardware and labor resources."

Key elements of Symantec Data Center Foundation strategy include:

Unrivalled Cross-Platform Support

The Symantec Data Center Foundation is designed to support all major open systems UNIX, Linux and Windows platforms, including Solaris, Solaris Opteron, HP-UX, AIX, Red Hat Linux, Novell SUSE Linux and Windows, as well as popular server virtualization technologies for these OS environments. Also supported are all major enterprise and modular storage hardware platforms from EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, Sun, Network Appliance and other vendors. Additionally, the Symantec Data Center Foundation is optimized for use with Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SAP, Oracle Applications (including Siebel and PeopleSoft), BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere and hundreds of other applications.

Products and Programs to Drive Standardization

Symantec is announcing a comprehensive new set of products to help customers standardize their data center infrastructure, to enable them to increase their service levels while actually driving down operational cost. These include innovative new offerings in Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0, the next generation of its leading storage management and virtualization technology, and the introduction of Veritas Server Foundation, a family of products that provides industry-leading configuration management, provisioning, and clustering capabilities. In addition, Symantec will introduce programs that make it simple and affordable for customers to deploy the Symantec Data Center Foundation as their data center standard.

Integrated

In contrast to dozens of different point tools from different vendors, the Symantec Data Center Foundation uses a common integration platform. Elements of this common platform are already deployed across multiple products in the Symantec Data Center Foundation. As the platform expands over time, it will provide a consistent experience across Symantec Data Center Foundation product families in such areas as sign-on process, install process, license management, reporting, workflow, user interface, CMDB integration and directory integration. Highlighted in the latest release of the Symantec Data Center Foundation is new license management technology, providing customers with a single, consistent way to manage Symantec license entitlements in their environments.