Actifio 6.0 Adds App Development, Cloud Enhancements

Actifio
Inc. announced a product release expanding its scope as a
strategic, application-defined copy data management platform.

Features in Actifio
6.0 allow companies to manage data in ways that go beyond
business resiliency applications – classic backup and BC use cases –
to manage enterprise data access in ways that enhance business
agility. The initial focus of these features is on the ability to
provision application data for self-service development and testing.
It is optimized for cloud service providers to accelerate service
introduction with less infrastructure and cost.

Highlights include:

• Automated application development
  workflows for better apps, 300% faster

• Accelerated service introduction for
  cloud providers with 90% less infrastructure

• Anywhere access with mobile management
  apps for real-time IT monitoring

• Advanced SAP, Exchange, SQL, HP-UX,
  AIX, IBM iSeries and Oracle Solaris Integrations

The system protects thousands of
enterprise applications, representing 396PB for over 250 users in 22
countries around the world, making it the fastest growing storage
company from inception. The power of the copy storage platform lies
in its ability to capture data from applications across the
enterprise, minimize the movement of the data across the network and
optimize its storage to reduce the overall cost of data management by
up to 90 percent.

Global CIO’s recognize its
applicability beyond backup and BC and are selecting the platform for
building better apps faster. In addition, cloud service providers,
which last quarter represented over 50% of the company’s bookings for
the first time, recognize that the platform transforms the economics
of their service delivery by allowing them to build and deliver more
compelling cloud-based services in ways that are both faster and more
efficient than ever before.

Better Apps Faster
Demand for apps is increasing and the
top priority is to develop apps faster. Analysts estimate that as
many as 2,000 mobile apps are released daily. According to IDC
Corp, the top reason for the growth of redundant copies of data,
or copy data, are an increased number of apps and more copies of
those apps being created. In fact, 41% of customers stated the
biggest copy data challenge is that development and test environments
lack resources to keep up with app demands, resulting in delays in
provisioning production and database images for development, test and
quality assurance (Source: TechValidate. TVID: D54-F93-B45).

This solution gives enterprises
integration between their infrastructure, enterprise apps and
underlying databases for application-aware data management,
self-service provisioning for development, on-demand test data
creation for user acceptance and full app lifecycle protection.
Enterprises can reuse the single, golden copy provided to work from
refreshable, application consistent data, accelerating development
and testing.

This is achieved through several capabilities:

• On-demand, self-service app
  development – Role-based controls enable self-service
  provisioning of test instances, and LiveCloneand LiveCloneLayers
  provide space-efficient, live-updated independent virtual copies of
  data.

• Dev/Test workflows –
  User-defined scheduled processing of copy data to streamline
  workflows for test and development, ETL, reporting, analytics and
  other business agility oriented processes.

"Copy data management is about
way more than making backup more efficient," said Ash
Ashutosh, founder and CEO, Actifio. "Once a customer has
protected their application data with Actifio, they can not only
recover it, they can leverage it in ways that make the business more
agile. With Actifio 6.0, we’re introducing new workflow tools and
specialized features to transform the way DBA’s get their hands on
the data they need to develop new applications, for example. And over
the coming months you’ll see us refine and integrate similar
features, to better support the use cases our customers are showing
us every day."

Better Clouds Faster
Cloud service providers are faced with
a legacy deployment model that creates business challenges,
including: siloed infrastructures that create asset utilization
challenges, heterogeneous environments that are complex and labor
intensive, and high costs for delivering differentiated service
levels and incremental services. The release for service providers
delivers a ‘business-in-a-box’ that transforms these underlying
economics, which completes the second phase of our cloud enablement
program. This release also unites our global cloud and channel
partner programs to be able to work together, in solving our users
common copy data challenges.

It allow cloud service providers to
launch services; including DevOps and dev/test services,
backup/recovery and archive-as-a-service from a single platform.

Features deliver on the following
service
provider functional requirements:

• Multi-tenancy – Separation of
  tenants with custom-scoped SLAs, resources, replication types…

• On-Boarding – Data seeding,
  non-disruptive application/data migration, API for portal integration

• Billing/Reporting – Integration
  with existing billing systems through RESTful API, PostgreSQL
  queries; virtual reporting appliance included

• Security – Role-based access
  controls, encryption in flight, optional encryption at rest, and full
  audit logging

"We’re thrilled with the
success our cloud service provider partners are having with their
Actifio-based offerings," said Actifio president, Jim Sullivan.
"Actifio 6.0 will provide them with the ability to deploy and
commercialize market-differentiated offerings more quickly, while
maintaining the simplicity of operations and capital efficiency that
have become our hallmark."

Deeper Business Resiliency
It delivers application support across
major enterprise platforms, including SQL Server, Exchange, SAP,
Oracle, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and IBM iSeries. It covers the majority
of enterprise applications providing data protection and BC.

Actifio Anywhere
In line with the trend towards the
‘consumerization’ of enterprise IT, it offers a mobile management
suite for iOS and Android devices that provides CIOs and IT
administrators with real-time monitoring of their business SLAs.

It is expected to be available
as a software upgrade for the Actifio copy storage platform during
the fourth quarter

"Organizations around the world
are now rapidly adopting copy data management solutions to solve many
symptoms of the $44 billion copy data explosion," said IDC research director, Ashish Nadkarni. "In the long
term, the effective use of copy data management provides more
efficient business resiliency and more agile and efficient
application development, testing, and DevOps. Already on their 6.0
release, Actifio is extending their lead in this exciting new
market."

"ESG continually sees IT
organizations of all sizes prioritizing Improving Backup/Recovery and
BC/DR capabilities, so it is obvious that folks are looking for fresh
ways to solve old problems," said Jason Buffington, senior
data protection analyst, ESG.
"And that is what Actifio is: a fresh approach to addressing
the age-old problem of creating too many copies of data, under the
admirable intent of data protection. With its 6.0 release, Actifio is
looking to build on its initial successes with a broader range of
protection scenarios being powered by its platform."

"IT organizations are
increasingly adopting DevOps. Service providers, especially those
with managed hosting and cloud-related infrastructure services, need
to adapt their processes and tools accordingly," noted
Gartner research VP, Lydia
Leong. "Service providers must learn to support agile
operations. This includes process and tools for continuous
integration and continuous deployment of customer applications,
DevOps configuration management approaches and the operations
approaches made possible by programmatic access to infrastructure."

"As the CIO responsible for
meeting application SLA requirements of our sensitive financial data,
I can sleep better at night knowing Actifio is my trusted platform
for backup and recovery," said Erik Dubovik, CIO, Audax
Group, Inc. "It’s exciting to see the platform extension
in 6.0 which opens up brand new use opportunities for our team to
leverage and helps me do more with less while getting more out of my
original investment."

"We were simply ready for a
single solution that could modernize data management and DevOps
requirements – from backup to DR and BC as well as the day-to-day
access of data for application testing withins," said Bryon
Bua, VP and manager of enterprise technology, Admirals
Bank. "Actifio fulfilled all of those requirements for us
with a single solution while also saving us $750,000 in disk costs
over five years and we’re excited to see the new 6.0 features that
will help our organization become even more agile."