Actifio Automates DevOps Across Lifecycle of Application Data

Actifio, Inc. announced a series of features and functional enhancements to better support the growing number of customers leveraging its Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology in support of DevOps use cases.

While infrastructure is increasingly seen as a commodity inside large enterprises, applications – where the technology touches the business – are becoming more strategic. Managing the flow of data that powers those applications presents a range of challenges at every stage of their lifecycle.

First, creating applications takes too long. Accessing the production data developers need to build new applications wastes weeks – even months – given the challenges of provisioning new storage, moving data, masking it, and keeping it current. Once an application is built, managing the data behind it is equally complex, given the conflicting requirements of providing data protection and access across the shifting landscape of enterprise infrastructure. Even the inevitable retirement of applications is an undue hassle, with companies required to maintain access to information forced to choose overly expensive point products to meet their compliance requirement.

Actifio is the solution: A comprehensive, application-centric approach to automating the full lifecycle of application data management, enabled by its patented Virtual Data Pipeline technology.

Highlights release include:

• Role-based access controls enabling distributed, self-serve data provisioning. Authorized developers, DBA’s, and data scientists can now access fresh copies of production data securely and instantly with just a few clicks.

• Operations, meanwhile, can better support users with self-service data access built for the enterprise. New application-specific extensions of the company’s ‘instant mount’ capabilities augment Actifio’s existing automated data masking workflows and LiveClone features, while improving security and control by reducing the proliferation of excess production copies.

• RESTful API for easy integration into automated operations and management frameworks, such as Chef, Puppet, and others.

• Easier protection of test/dev environments, enabling administrators to protect, replicate, and restore clones used for test/dev environments while minimizing storage requirements.

• Enhancements to the popular LogSmart feature, which allows administrators to protect a database and its log files with a single SLA. Users can now go beyond recovery and mount a database at any point-in-time or state (sequence number) for application development, analytics, testing, and other use cases.

• Oracle ASM instant restore, the ability to protect and instantly restore Oracle databases out-of-band using Automatic Storage Management (ASM) diskgroups when Oracle is running from ASM.

• Next generation of company’s Resiliency Director, which gives customers the power to recover 100’s of VMs simultaneously with a single click. Functional enhancements include the ability to recover multiple VMs in parallel, and configurable network settings to further accelerate recovery.

Delivers full lifecycle data management
The impact of these features on businesses is transformative, accelerating application development, improving application data management, and integrating application retirement.

First, Actifio improves application development by letting customers build better applications faster. Making data instantly available to the developers who want it while maintaining central control reduces the cycle time for application development, in some cases dramatically. Making it easier and less expensive to provide those developers with a constantly updated clone of production also reduces the likelihood of surprises in new application deployment, improving both code quality and time-to-market.

“For us, business availability means more than just recovering from backups or DR,” said Rene Eickhoff, enterprise architect, Mammoet. “It now means having highly reliable and fully tested application rollouts so that development mistakes don’t impact thousands of users on construction sites in the field. Having Actifio as a data virtualization platform to speed up application development and testing efforts makes a huge difference in assuring higher quality production IT services.“

“Mindtree specializes in solving complex business challenges with innovative technology services, from chip to cloud, development to analytics – and data is what underpins it all,” said Ram Mohan, EVP and head, infrastructure management services, Mindtree Ltd. “What Actifio delivers us is a platform for Managed Data Services that can speed up our development and analytics services with rapid virtual copies of current, production application data – without incremental infrastructure. That translates to game-changing leverage and faster time-to-market for us.“

Once an application is live in production, Actifio enables enhanced data Management, providing data protection, access, and control. Virtualizing data frees applications from infrastructure, enhancing business resiliency, agility, and data mobility in ways that save time, money, and complexity. IT executives are freed from the constraints of legacy infrastructure, to focus more time, energy, and resources on the requirements of the business than on the limitations of the technology.

“Investing in Actifio was a strategic choice, as the platform to protect and ensure the resiliency of our public-sector SAAS applications,” said Matt Bieri, CIO, Tyler Technologies, Inc. “During the deployment we also realized the power of Actifio to transform our data management processes, making it easy to provision data to test customer rollouts and to speed up development, as well as retain key data sets according to client-driven policies.“

Finally, Actifio transforms the concept of application retirement, enabling not just compliance, but real historical information access, even for data dependent on applications and infrastructure already decommissioned from production. Actifio application orchestration gives users the power to not just recover application data in a vacuum, but to restore access to an application, running on a VM, with the data as it existed at a specific historical point in time selected by the user.

“Managing the data for our critical back-office applications is key, especially those running on Oracle databases,” said Richard Siedzik, director IT, Bryant University. “We need SLAs we can rely on and that’s why we deployed Actifio. Once we virtualized the copies of our application data, we can set up policies to use and retain the data however our organization needs it – whether it’s for DR, or to easily retain and recover data from a retired credit card or learning application.“

Melinda-Carol Ballou, program director, application lifecycle management and executive strategies, IDC, said: “Lifecycle data management often results in costly inefficiencies and software delivery delays. Actifio’s offering creates new use cases that improve user options to help create business agility, resilience and cloud access. This technology – coupled with appropriate usage and process adoption – eases the impact of managing data for customers.“

“Actifio delivers full lifecycle application data management in a way no other provider can, across the varying requirements of application development, management, and retirement,” said Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO, Actifio. “We do it by virtualizing copy data, freeing application data from the constraints of the infrastructure it was created on. In the process we free customers from the wasted time, cost, and complexity of data management models architected for the 20th century. And that changes everything.“