Data management provider Actifio will be getting a lot of new exposure due to recently completed business deals with a couple of the world’s largest cloud service providers.
The first entails Actifio making its enterprise-class data management available for customer workloads on Amazon Web Services. The other adds the Nearline cloud storage service on Google’s Cloud Platform available as a one-click vaulting option from directly within the Actifio application.
Actifio Sky for AWS is now available as a listing in AWS Marketplace, making it easier to run Actifio’s Virtual Data Pipeline in a virtual machine in the AWS Cloud.
Actifio pioneered copy data virtualization, a data management technique which involves decoupling business data from business infrastructure in much the same way hypervisors decouple compute from physical servers.
Key Features
Users of Actifio Virtual Data Pipeline can capture production application data at the block level; manage that data as a single “golden master,” updated incrementally forever; and use an unlimited number of point-in-time, virtual copies–available instantly, on demand–and across a full range of data management use cases.
Moving only changed blocks minimizes the transport bandwidth required to support data replication across dedicated and cloud-based infrastructure, Actifio said. When the time comes to access data, “mounting” a virtual copy on Actifio supplements the local copy with only those remote blocks required to deliver the required application from the required point in time.
Actifio replaces the siloed systems typically used to protect and access copies of production data, helping users accelerate recovery time objectives and time-to-market for new applications. Users also save money on third-party software licenses and unnecessary infrastructure sprawl, in addition to simplifying operations through the consolidation of multiple point tools into a single data management platform, the company noted.
Background on Copy Data Virtualization
As more enterprises use virtualization in servers and storage to collapse infrastructure and enable cloud service models, many are discovering the problems posed by essential application data that is unusable due to legacy infrastructures. Solving this data problem is more difficult than vendors typically will admit because copy data multiplies incessantly.
Copy data is everything that is not currently being used in production. A new approach called copy data virtualization (CDV), pioneered by Boston-based Actifio but now provided by multiple vendors, offers an answer for this loss of control.
CDV applies the same virtualization approach to data that changed everything with servers a dozen years ago. It frees data from the use case-defined silos of infrastructure that characterize older-generation data management architectures, thus opening the door for global enterprises to obtain better use of their apps and realize the business resiliency, agility and economic advantages smaller companies have seen for years.