Symantec is also introducing Veritas Storage Foundation Basic, a free version of Storage Foundation designed for edge-tier and infrastructure workloads that make it easier and more affordable for customers to enjoy the dramatic benefits of standardising their data center infrastructure software. It is available for download from www.symantec.com/sfbasic.

The infrastructure required to manage information was so complex that "we spend all our time dealing with infrastructure and not enough time dealing with information and the implication of information on the business and on to the customer," explained Symantec senior vice-president for enterprise security and data management Jeremy Burton.

"Our whole message around Foundation is: let us take care of standardising the infrastructure so you, Mr CIO, can focus on the information. Make the CIO more of a chief information officer rather than a chief infrastructure officer," he said.

Symantec's new set of tools to help manage data centres 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 virtualisation technologies for these OS environments.

Burton said that this cross-platform support was unprecedented: "In the past, people have had to wait and we've said 'if you wait a year we'll give you HP-UX,' or, 'if you wait a year, we'll give you Linux,' but it's all on day one now.

"I think people have gone through this data centre consolidation but they've got all the junk from their 100 data centres and put it in one place, but they're now trying to rationalise and standardise it," he said in an interview.

Standardisation was one of the best ways for a data centre to improve reliability and lower costs, he pointed out.

"If we standardise the way that we provision storage, protect storage, recover data, then people are going through the same process every single time they do some provisioning or recovery - and that has to have an impact on reliability, said Burton, likening this process to ERP for IT.

Symantec's Data Center Foundation also supports all major enterprise and modular storage hardware platforms from EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, Sun, Network Appliance and other vendors, while it is optimised for use with Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SAP, Oracle Applications (including Siebel and PeopleSoft), BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere and hundreds of other applications, according to the company.

Components include Veritas Server Foundation, a product family that is now available and consisting of Veritas Configuration Manager (formerly Relicore Clarity) and Veritas Provisioning Manager complemented by new features in Veritas Cluster Server.

Veritas Server Foundation gives enterprise customers the ability to discover in detail what is running on all the servers in their data centre, actively manage and administer those servers, and ensure that mission critical applications running on those servers are always available.

Configuration Manager helps administrators comprehensively understand what is running in the data centre, and track how it is changing by discovering all the servers and applications in the data center, as well as their configurations and the dependencies between them.

It then tracks any changes to these configurations and dependencies in real-time, and can compare current configurations to established standards to ensure internal and external compliance.

Several customers say "we don't know how many servers we have", and tracking is often by using out-of-date spreadsheets or sticky notes, explained Symantec Senior Group Manager of Product marketing Peter McKeller.

Configuration Manager, a brand new product, automatically discovered all information about a server, the operating system, applications installed and then agents track any changes that are made, instantly notifying administrators, he said.

The product also gave visibility to virtual servers by treating them just like physical servers, he added.

Veritas Provisioning Manager (formerly OpForce) lowered labour costs and reduced error rates by automating many common, routine tasks such as provisioning servers and applications, deploying patches, and rolling out new software packages - all through a centralised console, he said, adding that it speeded up operating system and application deployment, providing IT with a cost-effective solution to ensure consistent deployments, while streamlining management. McKellar said that the alternative to this would be to build servers from a CD, which often introduced errors.

Veritas Server Foundation included new features in Veritas Cluster Server designed to reduce both planned and unplanned downtime, whether due to hardware failures, data centre-wide disasters, or server maintenance, by automating local and wide area application failover, he added. The new Veritas Cluster Server 5.0, available this Summer, will enable customers to monitor, manage, and report on multiple local and remote clusters from a single web-based console. In addition, Cluster Server 5.0 incorporates a feature called Fire Drill that allows organisations to easily perform non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery failovers to ensure reliability.

Symantec said it also planned to introduce programmes that make it simple and affordable for customers to deploy the Symantec Data Center Foundation as their data centre standard.