Actifio OnVault: Long-Term Data Retention Solution

Actifio, Inc. announced OnVault, a low-cost long-term data retention (LTDR) solution that enables data re-use for business intelligence, analytics, compliance and data warehousing tools to unlock business value.

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The OnVault capability is part of the core company’s platform, and is available for AWS S3, Google Cloud Nearline and IBM Cloud Object Storage (formerly Cleversafe).

The term ‘vault’ comes from the practice of locking away tape media literally in a physical vault for compliance requirements, expecting never to be used again. More recently, as the need to recover data became a regulatory requirement, expensive deduplication disk devices were used to store data for the long term. Both these practices result in a graveyard of data that is complex to manage, rarely useable, and locked into vendor’s proprietary formats, and have become costly to doing business.

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Built on firm’s data virtualization technology, OnVault is a solution to combine the low-cost infrastructure for long-term data retention and deliver instant data access to drive business acceleration with business intelligence, analytics, compliance and data warehousing tools. Businesses now have a single data management solution to handle the entire lifecycle of data generated by business applications, social media, machine logs, IoT, among other sources; from creation, protection, analysis, and compliance to eventual deletion, both on-premises or in the cloud.

This capability is a continuation of company’s disruptive mission to efficiently transform how data is accessed, managed and protected.

Halski Systems, an IT managed services and cloud solutions provider, has adopted OnVault. “Halski specializes in working in a number of regulated industries, which have required our clients to retain data for years and years,” said Seth Seagraves, president, Halski Systems. “Needless to say, the burden of retaining that data, on tape or even de-dupe appliances, is a costly proposition. Actifio Copy Data Virtualization has already transformed our service capabilities already for rapid DR. Now with OnVault’s native integration with public cloud storage, we are driving down the operational overhead and total cost of managing client data for multiple years – with the flexibility to use AWS or Google Cloud – and still get access to the data easily.“

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OnVault is available in company’s Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) version 7.0 software, and delivers the following benefits:

• Low-cost long-term data retention: Eliminate capital and operational expense needed to acquire and manage tape libraries, tape media, VTLs and/or dedicated deduplication appliances.

• Instant data access anywhere for multiple use-cases: Company’s technology for managing data in native format and making it instantly available allows re-use of OnVault data for multiple tools to accelerate business: analytics, business intelligence, rich media analysis, compliance, legal holds, data integrity checks on historical data, ETL processing, processing of IoT data, analysis of historical machine logs, etc.

• No vendor lock-in: A OnVault utility is available to authorized users to access their OnVault data, even without an firm’s appliance. Enterprises can confidently retain data for the long term, and unlock business value without the fear of lock-in to a technology, solution or vendor.

• Security and efficiency: All data is encrypted in transit, and can be compressed and encrypted at rest, for security and efficient utilization of storage.

• Radically simple management: In what has become a hallmark of the firm, OnVault is simple to manage. Each application is assigned a SLA as part of data lifecycle management, defining retention and choice of one or more platforms for long-term data retention.

“Vault was yet another silo in application data lifecycle that remained frozen in time for decades. Businesses plow exponentially increasing investment in this data graveyard, and this was just another cost of doing business,” said Ash Ashutosh, CEO and founder, Actifio. “OnVault transforms long-term retained data into an active, thriving platform that unlocks business value for use in ways that will give businesses an actual competitive advantage – not just a big insurance or mortuary bill.“

Firm’s VDP version 7 includes other enhancements, including:

• StreamSnap for low-RPO replication and DR

• Enhancements for database management and protection

• Extended platform support and enhancements for Hyper-V CSV environments

• Continued enhancements in usability, performance and scale

• The company’s CDS appliance‘s support for new back-end storage arrays, including Infinidat F2000 and F6000, XtremIO versions 2.4, 3.0 and 4.0, and newer firmware versions of many other arrays

• Enhanced scalability in the CDS appliance’s snapshot pool, supporting four times the capacity of snapshots of the prior version – now up to four petabytes