Can Symantec Strap A Rocket To XenSource?

XenSource got a significant credibility boost today from its strategic partnership with Symantec Corporation. Leveraging Veritas Storage Foundation dramatically simplifies storage and HA services integration for XenSource, since VSF is the market leader. While XenSource and Symantec will still have to do a lot of interoperability testing before enterprises will trust it for wide deployment, the task is much simpler than the path VMware is going down, developing its own storage foundation services.

Symantec also plans to test and certify new XenEnterprise HA functionality, collaborate with them on further advances in this area, and certify NetBackup with this hypervisor.

With this move, XenSource is starting to look like a more serious contender in the x86 server virtualization market. While this move is unlikely to position them on par with VMware (as outlined by Frank Gillett in “Despite Challengers, VMware Will Continue To Lead Server Virtualization”), it moves the needle pretty far.

By James Staten.

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