Actifio,
the copy data virtualization company, today announced the availability
of a platform extension called Big Data Director (“BDD.”) BDD helps
customers protect and recover large-scale file systems, drastically
reducing backup windows compared to traditional approaches such as
Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP). Notably, Actifio BDD can also
provide access to as many as 50 million files in under five minutes,
accelerating recovery and analytics processes. BDD was released as part
of Actifio’s Virtual Data Pipeline version 6.2, also available now.
Despite repeated efforts to modernize backup and disaster recovery
technology, many enterprise customers still face spiraling data growth
and operational complexity caused by specialized software point tools
and siloed storage media. Conventional backup technologies make the
protection of critical business applications slow, expensive, and
complex, and make the movement toward a hybrid cloud infrastructure
model unnecessarily difficult.
Actifio has now helped over 1,000 enterprise customers – both directly
and through its rapidly expanding global network of cloud service
provider partners - modernize their backup once and for all using its
patented Virtual Data Pipeline™ (VDP) technology, delivering:
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Hybrid cloud mobility – The ability to easily move data between
data centers, remote locations, service providers and clouds.
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Instant data access – Enabling better applications to be
developed faster and more easily through the provision of high
fidelity test data on demand.
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Fast and Easy data protection – Efficient, incremental-forever
snapshots deliver the lowest possible RTO for multi-TB Oracle, SQL DB,
VMware VMs, physical machines and many other heterogeneous
applications.
One early user of Actifio BDD is a Fortune 100 financial services
company with a complex IT environment including hundreds of VMware VMs,
physical servers for Microsoft SQL Server databases and data warehouses
of up to 10 TB in size, as well as more than 20 million files across 3
million directories on 45TB of Isilon NAS. The firm's IT organization
was challenged to backup and recover both its large databases and the
substantial file data in timeframes that were acceptable to the
business. In particular, replicating backups of the Isilon file storage
was impossible with its current implementation, so it made do with
additional expensive NAS snapshots.
After considering various packages of different tools, including Isilon
replication, Commvault, EMC Networker and an upgrade of their legacy
backup tools, the company deployed Actifio to protect all of its open
systems environment. This includes its vSphere environment, physical
servers and databases, as well as the Isilon NAS data. Now with Actifio
BDD, incremental backups of the NAS environment are always done in under
20 minutes. All of the NAS-based files are accessible in minutes
on-site, or at its DR site, because of the firm's use of Actifio Dedup
Async Replication. Additionally, local or remote recovery of VMs and
databases can be done in minutes, as opposed to the two-to-three days it
formerly took the firm to recover large databases from tape. By
consolidating its data protection approaches onto Actifio, the company
has eliminated three hardware platforms and five software tools,
substantially simplifying the IT team’s operations and reducing cost.
“Like most large businesses, time is what really counts to Sutherland.
Even the top traditional backup systems could not deliver the recovery
times we wanted for our mission critical SQL databases and VMware
environment,” said David Tefft, Director of Network Operations at global
law firm Sutherland. “The rapid recovery and access that Actifio
delivers, along with its efficient and unique approach to virtualizing,
managing and moving data, is why it’s our standard to protect hundreds
of terabytes of our data.”
“The biggest backup and data protection pain points for enterprise IT
leaders are, first, ‘Cost’, second, ‘Keeping pace with the capacity of
data to protect,’ and third, ‘Reducing backup and recovery times,’” said
Scott Sinclair, analyst of Enterprise Strategy Group, a leading
enterprise technology analyst firm. “Actifio’s enterprise-class copy
data virtualization platform is able to address these pains by saving
companies money through infrastructure and tool consolidation,
delivering instant mounts for data access and shrinking non-production
data growth with virtual data copies. The extension of those
capabilities out to large NAS servers is an exciting development, given
the presence of such NAS systems among many in Actifio’s growing
enterprise customer base.”
Actifio Founder & CEO Ash Ashutosh said, “It’s been widely reported over
the last few weeks that it’s just a matter of time before the cost of
enterprise storage approaches zero. Some have argued it’s already there.
Our ambition is to take that one step further... to drive the cost of backup
to zero, to make it a fringe benefit of enterprise-class copy data
virtualization that enables data mobility for the hybrid cloud and
self-serve instant access for application developers. BDD extends the
umbrella of that backup one more step into the data center, and our
customers can expect more to come.”
Additional Product Features and Availability
Actifio VDP 6.2 is generally available now. It includes enhancements in
test data management to improve application development and testing with
expanded workflows for self-service and scheduled data provisioning,
enhanced SQL Server support and more granular information on mounted
application data. VDP 6.2 also includes replication management, security
and multi-tenancy enhancements, vSphere 6 support, and more granular
protection of specific volumes inside VMs.
Actifio BDD is generally available for EMC Isilon scale-out NAS
environments and is in beta for NetApp 7-Mode NAS systems. NetApp
Cluster-Mode systems and other filers will be supported in the future.