Microsoft Cloud ServicesPartner Solution Case Study

Symantec Providing Cost-effective, Reliable Disaster Recovery Options in the Cloud

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Manufacturing – High Tech

Partner ProfileSymantec provides security, storage, and systems management solutions to help individuals and organizations secure and manage their information and identities. The Fortune 500 company is based in Mountain View, California.

Business SituationSymantec wanted to create a solution that could help customers reduce the cost and complexity of implementing disaster recovery solutions.

SolutionThe company chose Windows Azure to build a new Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). The solution uses cloud-based resources on Windows Azure to reduce the expense and management burden of disaster recovery systems.

Benefits Lower costs, more automation Reliability and enhanced security Opens market opportunities

“A disaster recovery offering running on Windows Azure can provide customers with significant savings in IT costs and time.”

Saveen Pakala, Director of Product Management in the Storage and Availability Management Group at Symantec

Symantec provides organizations around the world with solutions to help protect data. To provide its customers with automated, reliable and cost-effective disaster recovery (DR) options, Symantec is creating a disaster recovery solution that uses Windows Azure. The solution, which is built on the Symantec’s Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows offering, can deliver a cost-effective, automated, and reliable way to reduce disaster recovery and complexity by moving many DR tasks to the cloud. The solution also makes disaster recovery options more affordable for small and medium-sized enterprises.

SituationSymantec is one of the IT industry’s leading providers of security, storage, availability, and systems management solutions. Its product line runs the gamut from software for individuals and small businesses such as anti-virus and backup solutions, to sophisticated enterprise solutions that provide services such as network security, backup for datacenters, and storage and availability management.

One of the company’s ongoing missions is to help organizations protect vital information. As part of that effort, Symantec provides disaster recovery (DR) solutions that can help organizations avoid serious losses in revenues, customers, and even brand image following unexpected downtime.

The challenge with traditional disaster recovery solutions, however, is that they involve a lot of cost and complexity. Organizations face constantly escalating costs when building and managing disaster recovery datacenters and resource-intensive manual recovery processes. DR systems typically require extensive procedures for testing the viability of recovery scenarios, along with resource-intensive management of implementations across disparate physical, virtual, and application environments.

“Disaster recovery solutions can be expensive from the perspective of both capital and operational expense,” says Saveen Pakala, Director of Product Management in the Storage and Availability Management Group at Symantec. “Disaster recovery involves a lot of moving parts, including many teams and

pieces of infrastructure, from storage components to servers to networks. All of this makes the disaster recovery process laborious, time consuming, and prone to errors.”

With the rapid advances being made in cloud technologies, more and more customers looked to Symantec for a disaster recovery solution that can take advantage of cloud functionality while still protecting the investments already made in on-premise systems. Their goal is have more flexible and affordable options to deal with outages caused by natural disasters, power or storage system failures, and network or maintenance issues.

SolutionSymantec chose Windows Azure as the best choice for creating a hybrid disaster recovery solution. Known as a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), it is designed to deliver the best of both cloud-based and on-premise systems.

Don Angspatt, Vice President of Product Management in the Storage and Availability Management Group at Symantec, says Microsoft was a natural choice for the new DRaaS solution. “The Microsoft leadership in the cloud space with Windows Azure and the well-known Microsoft brand can help overcome customer concerns about using the cloud for business-critical disaster recovery tasks,” he says.

With its selection of Windows Azure, Symantec began adapting Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows for the new environment. This is a core Symantec

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“Disaster recovery solutions can be expensive from the perspective of both capital and operational expense."

Saveen Pakala, Director of Product Management, Storage and Availability

Group, Symantec

offering that delivers storage management and high availability across a wide range of operating platforms.

The DRaaS solution performs three essential tasks. It provides storage management, it delivers high availability for data and applications, and it supports disaster recovery scenarios. To accomplish these tasks, Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows provides two key components, including:

A storage management and monitoring component. This supports host-based storage management functionality, such as volume management, replication, and snapshotting. It can be used on offerings from a range of storage vendors, including HP, NetApp, Hitachi, and EMC.

Clustering and high availability functions, which are available through the Veritas Cluster Server. These functions support application monitoring, local failover and availability functions, and wide-area failover of applications. They provide high availability and disaster recovery for enterprise applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SharePoint Server, Enterprise Vault, and Blackberry Server, and wide-area disaster recovery for Hyper-V virtual machines.

Another component of the solution is the Veritas Operations Manager, a comprehensive management platform with tools such as real-time operations monitoring with risk dashboards, visibility into application performance, and a unified view of storage and availability configurations.

BenefitsBy choosing Windows Azure, Symantec could pursue a solution that helps organizations cut costs while increasing flexibility in their DR systems. The Symantec DRaaS solution can help customers reduce the amount of maintenance needed for disaster recovery, while letting them take advantage of automated routines. The solution can deliver the kind of reliability needed for accessing data in the event of a disaster. It also helps Symantec reach a broader audience that includes small and medium-size enterprises.

Lower Costs, More AutomationBy moving some elements of disaster recovery architecture to the cloud, the Windows Azure solution can help organizations cut costs.

“With Windows Azure, customers can reduce their costs right off the bat because they don’t have to maintain the disaster recovery site,” says Pakala. “It’s running on Windows Azure, so the actual maintenance of the infrastructure used to support disaster recovery operations is managed at a Microsoft datacenter. A disaster recovery offering running on Windows Azure can provide customers with significant savings in IT costs and time. It helps them avoid using a data center that requires facilities cost, depreciating hardware, and ongoing IT staff support.”

Additionally, the solution can be deployed on virtual machines, so organizations can continue using their existing investments, regardless of their hardware platforms and operating systems. This enables an interoperable solution that works not only

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"With Windows Azure, customers can reduce their costs right off the bat because they don’t have to maintain the disaster recovery site."

Saveen Pakala, Director of Product Management, Storage and Availability

Group, Symantec

with Microsoft systems but also with open-source environments.

Pakala adds that organizations can save time and money through automated routines.

“When you think about the amount of manual labor required in traditional disaster recovery scenarios—such as setting up the storage piece, managing applications, and ensuring proper replication—the Windows Azure solution can really cut down on time and overhead,” he says. “With Windows Azure and our DRaaS solution, companies can automate a broad range of disaster recovery tasks to reduce time and expense while also minimizing the possibility of errors that arise from manual intervention.”

Reliability and Security for Data RecoveryReliability and availability of data is an obvious component of effective disaster recovery systems. Pakala says the Symantec solution running on Windows Azure gives customers options for testing various configurations to find one that provides the best reliability and availability.

“We provide an option for customers to test their disaster recovery solution in the cloud on Windows Azure as many times as they want without affecting the production environment. That helps them arrive at the best possible configuration,” he says. “In the end what they get is a truly cost-effective, automated, and reliable disaster recovery solution.”

Customers are also assured that their data is protected when moving between physical and cloud environments. “We designed the solution to provide a secure connection between the on-premise infrastructure and the Windows Azure environment,” he says.

New Market OpportunitiesUsing Windows Azure as the cloud platform for its disaster recovery solution opens up new market opportunities for Symantec. In the past, small and medium-sized enterprises usually avoided traditional disaster recovery solutions because of the potential cost and complexity.

“We believe this new offering will change that mindset,” says Pakala. “For small and medium-sized enterprises, the Windows Azure DR solution becomes a very attractive, cost-effective way to provide disaster recovery. Smaller organizations will not have to maintain a separate disaster recovery site with all the required server, storage, and network infrastructure—and all the skilled resources needed to manage such an environment. They can offload that work to Windows Azure and Microsoft, benefitting from disaster recovery capabilities that were cost-prohibitive in the past.”

Microsoft Cloud ServicesMicrosoft offers a complete set of cloud-based solutions to meet business needs, including solutions for advertising, communications (email, meetings), collaboration (document storage, sharing, workflow), business applications (customer resource management, business

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about Symantec products and services, call (650) 527-8000 or visit the website at: www.symantec.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published June 2012

Software and Services Windows Azure

"For small and medium-sized enterprises, the Windows Azure DR solution becomes a very attractive, cost-effective way to provide disaster recovery."

Saveen Pakala, Director of Product Management, Storage and Availability

Group, Symantec

productivity), data storage and management, and infrastructure services. In addition, customers can take advantage of an entire ecosystem of solution providers and Microsoft partners. For more information, please visitwww.microsoft.com/cloud

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