Actifio just announced a new version of its platform, Actifio 10C, and it comes with a bunch of goodies just in time for year-end festivities. The version numbering itself reveals a triumvirate of themes around the letter C: cloud, containers, and copy data. While the first too are critical in supporting the “how to” or “where,” the third (copy data) is really about the ability to further leverage data assets, an area in which I believe Actifio has done better than others.
This new version does reinforce the key capabilities that have made Actifio successful, which is data protection/recovery at scale. Scale is everything for enterprises, and it requires performance and flexibility. Our research shows data protection is not only moving to the cloud, it is expected to be as efficient as possible (achieving strict RPOs and RTOs) and cost-optimized. Recovery is critical for successful cloud-based data protection. In this version, there are many cloud-related improvements such as one-click multi-cloud orchestration and restore (automated DR at scale), and advances in leveraging object storage (more performance at a fraction of the cost) with intelligent caching including direct S3-compatible object storage recovery. Net net: faster, at scale, and cost-effective recovery in multi-cloud.
Our research also shows that cloud will play an increasingly important role in intelligent data management or data reuse, which is not that surprising given the significant advances and services cloud providers offer today. Cloud tops the list of intelligent data management topologies.
In 10c, Actifio adds rapid cloning of databases to containers to accelerate application test and release cycles. In essence, end-users can reuse backups backups to instantly clone multi-Terabyte databases leveraging Kubernetes-managed containers. The benefit is obvious: one data set can be leveraged across multiple test instances and only changes get stored. I am tempted to call it “parallelized data reuse.” It’s also self service, which means a QA team, for example, will be autonomous, and not depend on other parts of IT. Cost optimizations therefore occur in 2 areas: storage and operational efficiencies. Business optimization should stem from the ability for developers or QA teams to do their job better and faster, which helps the top and bottom lines. Actifio also integrates with Dev/Ops leading tools.
Data reuse generates broad business benefits. Our most recent research highlighted the main areas in which organizations that implement secondary data reuse, or intelligent data management, can benefit. We believe that data reuse is critical to lower business risk and to foster business growth and expansion. Stay tuned for more on this topic in January. Version 10C adds wizards for mission-critical databases like SAP HANA/ASE/MaxDB, Oracle, Oracle EBS, MS SQL, Db2, and other enterprise databases with incremental-forever application-consistent backup, instant recovery, and rapid database cloning for test/dev anywhere (on-premises or in AWS, Azure, GCP, and IBM Cloud).
With this new release Actifio is well positioned to capture more business and further its market presence as the “Go”-to (pun intended) intelligent data management platform. Our research shows that intelligent data management (heavily predicated on data reuse) is where the backup and recovery market is going. It looks as though Actifio is going there faster than others.
