Symantec has announced Veritas Operations Services, a new cloud computing-based online services platform to help organizations identify hidden risks in their data centers - improving service availability and increasing productivity of the operations staff. Veritas Installation Assessment and Veritas Storage Foundation Health Check are the first two services immediately available, providing an alternative to traditional reactive operations models and enabling IT organizations to perform prioritized, preventative maintenance using the latest known good configurations, best practices and data center risks. Symantec's new Operations Services proactively manages the storage and server environment to deliver rapid time to value and expands the Symantec portfolio to help organizations secure and manage their information.

"Until now, most data center operators have been in break-fix mode," said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president of the Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec. "With Veritas Operations Services, Symantec delivers a visionary management model that will find risks before they strike and guide remediation to ensure speedy intervention. We chose a cloud services model because we can deliver new risk profiles more quickly and our customers can realize value almost effortlessly."

Delivered via a cloud computing model, Symantec's Operations Services tracks best practices, optimal configurations, hardware compatibility lists and software compatibility lists for Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, leading operating systems and array-based software. A collection of web-based services use this intelligence to identify data center risks and improve productivity of operations teams as they try to deal with the new data center architectures and scale. Alerts include steps for guided remediation to speed and simplify resolution.

The Installation Assessment Service, the first of several planned Symantec offerings, delivers an intuitive, web-based validation of the complex configurations in the server and storage infrastructure. This proactive approach simplifies version upgrades and new installations by validating the complete stack prior to starting the installation process.

Other services currently available include a Storage Foundation Health Check, which identifies configuration errors that can result in downtime, performance issues and poor resource utilization. The Storage Foundation Health Check Service draws upon the experience of more than 15 years of data center deployments in the world's most mission-critical applications.

"With the launch of Veritas Operations Services, Symantec is delivering a valuable cloud service offering to its data center customers," said Bob Laliberte, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "It's those very large, complex environments with lots of moves, adds and changes that will benefit the most by leveraging a service that proactively validates configurations. However, any customer with broad deployments of Storage Foundation and Cluster Server should strongly consider using Operations Services today - it will help them improve availability, reduce complexity and reduce costs."