With complexity on the rise in data centers, Symantec is evangelising standardisation in data center management software, touting its Veritas management softwares.

Data center complexity has increased due to multiple management tools that their managers have to deal with, the accompanying multiple training that has to be imparted to IT staff, and the multiple chores of maintenance that have to be performed on the various IT elements of the data center, explained Sriram Iyer, Director, Data Center Management Group, Symantec in a recent interaction with  Network Computing.

Then there is the problem of staff boredom due to a high number of mundane tasks that have to be performed. ‘‘Staffing issues are a big concern in Asia Pacific data centers. Finding the right people is difficult; then attrition is high because people get bored having to perform mundane tasks and leave. In fact, one big reason for downtime is all these bored people,’’ Iyer said.

Which is why reducing the number of data center management tools and automating many of those tasks would be really helpful.  

Symantec believes that all this complexity and boredom can be eliminated if data center managers adopt a single layer of management software. The Veritas Storage Foundation Management Server gives centralised visibility into data center infrastructure and enables centralised management of applications, servers and storage, and serves as a stepping stone to automation. It also enables storage reclamation and storage migration for dynamic tiering as well as server consolidation through clustering and reduces downtime in server migration.

The company claims that it is in a better position to offer such software than other data center vendors because its software is vendor-agnostic, whereas other vendors are trying to protect their proprietary hold over customers.