Enterprise storage was the theme as Symantec chairman and chief executive John Thompson unveiled 'Storage United' at the firm's Vision 2007 conference in Las Vegas.

"Storage United is about uniting platforms, administration and storage requirements across the business environment," Thompson told conference attendees.

The Storage United platform will include Symantec's Veritas NetBackup, Command Central Storage and Enterprise Vault offerings. The systems will be presented as a single platform to manage storage and make systems more efficient.

A new version of NetBackup was unveiled, while updates to Command Central Storage and Enterprise Vault are planned for later this year.

"We are serious about pulling together these storage services and being the company that customers turn to when they have these data centre storage needs," Robert Soderbery, senior vice president of the storage foundation group at Symantec, told vnunet.com.

The new platform was driven in part by what Symantec views as a growing inefficiency in the way that enterprises manage storage systems.

Thompson said that the company had found an average efficiency rate of only 30-35 per cent among enterprise storage systems.

Soderbery believes that the waste of storage space is down to the huge cuts that many enterprises have made to their IT departments in recent years.

The practice of consolidating several IT departments into one means a glut of systems under a single roof, and a rampant waste of space and energy.

"They took all that stuff and they jammed it together so, while they have consolidated the organisation, it is just a mess," explained Soderbery.

"The next challenge for IT is how to standardise and optimise these new consolidated assets."

Storage United will also be pitched as a way to ease the consolidation that occurs when companies seek to cut energy and equipment costs through virtualisation.

"There is a political tension that occurs," said Soderbery. "If I am going to deploy virtualisation, I am going to have to get [multiple departments] to agree to run applications in the same box."

A standardised system can avoid political tensions and ease the transition to a single virtualised system.