Actifio Extends Copy Data Virtualisation Platform With Sky Software

 Actifio, Inc. announced an expansion of its product portfolio increasing the scope and scale of its enterprise data virtualisation platform.

 Actifio Sky

The offering will extend the functionality of Actifio’s copy data solution, making a virtual instance of the company’s Virtual Data Pipeline technology available wherever application data may reside, from the data centre core to the public cloud.

The new product will be the first in a new family called Actifio Skyand marks a milestone for the company as it moves beyond its integrated appliance-only roots.

What Actifio Does
Distributed enterprises are focused on improving resiliency, agility, and mobility toward cloud-based infrastructure, even as the sheer volume of data they need to manage is exploding. Actifio’s copy data virtualisation platform solves these problems, replacing a complex tangle of siloed storage and data management systems – all creating copies of the same production data – with a single solution that lets customers:

• Capture data from production applications according to an SLA that can be defined in few clicks and changed at any time,
• Managethe lifecycle of that data in the most efficient way, through the creation of a single ‘golden master’ that can be stored anywhere and updated incrementally forever, and
• Use that data to spin up an unlimited number of virtual copies for any use, at any time and anywhere.

Actifio virtualises data as other technologies have virtualised compute and networking, decoupling increasingly strategic enterprise data from increasingly commoditised enterprise infrastructure.

IDC estimates the worldwide market for products and services in this space, which it refers to as copy data management, at $46 billion this year.

“The copy data problem is a huge challenge that European CIOs raise time and time again in conversation. IDC found that on average 65% of external disk storage capacity is used to store copies of production data. Companies create snapshots, clones, replicas, archival, and backup data to fulfill increasing requirements to develop new (primarily mobile) applications, fulfill tighter regulatory requirements around data protection and DR (for example the pending EU data protection regulation) and provide data for analytics and reporting purposes,” said Carla Arend, IDC’s EMEA software program director. “Actifio has an interesting approach to solving this problem: by combining copy data virtualization, storage efficiency and application-aware data management services, Actifio enables companies to provide virtual copies of the data for the various different use cases. The new Actifio Sky product family is yet another innovative capability from Actifio to help European CIOs solve their major data management challenges – from the core to the cloud.“

Until now, Actifio has delivered this capability through the custom configuration and deployment of an integrated appliance combining hardware and software, called the Actifio CDS. It supports a range of platforms (VMWare, Windows, Linux, AIX, Unix, etc.), applications (VMWare, SQL, Oracle, Exchange, Sharepoint, SAP, etc.), and use cases (backup, snapshot, BC/DR, development and test, compliance, analytics, etc.), scaling up and out well into the multi-petabyte range.

Actifio Sky
Sky is a new generation of Actifio technology built entirely on the foundation of the company’s Virtual Data Pipeline technology, now protected by an expanding portfolio of 36 in process or approved patents. It extends the power of copy data virtualisation from the data centre to the edge of the enterprise, and beyond that into the cloud.

Sky offers a new level of deployment flexibility and range, making it easier and in some cases possible to move data back to a central data management site to improve data protection, governance, and analytics. It will be offered first in a ROBO Edition and a cloud deployment option for businesses looking to shift enterprise workloads into the cloud. Together with CDS data centre appliance, Sky eliminates barriers to data mobility from the edge to the core, enabling transformational data management velocity and scale across the enterprise.

Built on the core VDP technology, Sky’s capabilities now include:

• Easy download and deploy with a consumer-grade UI delivering a point-and-click data management delivering faster time to productivityApplication-centric, SLA-based management for powerful remote data protection and DR for applications
• Rapid recovery from remote site failure, centrally, or into the cloud
• The ability to vault data directly to public cloud storage services including Amazon Web Services
• Patented dedup-async replication for network-optimised data replication and space efficiency through direct-to-dedup storage.

“Actifio Sky represents a powerful addition to the Actifio Copy Data platform. Customers will now be able to apply copy data virtualization at remote sites or chose to select data protection via cloud services,” said Anand Choudha, MD, Spectrami. “Again Actifio has enabled customers to further reduce their overall costs associated with copy data management so they can focus on more strategic aspects of their business.”

Mohammed Suleman, GM, Enterprise Objectives, adds: “Actifio Sky enables customers to build a data protection and consolidation strategy that has predictable costs and concrete measurable business benefits. Especially branch or remote offices with no IT presence have always been difficult to handle when it comes to storage, backup and removing copy data. This makes Actifio Sky a very attractive proposition for companies that have addressed the problem within their data centers, or head office, but have not  been able to tackle remote sites.”

Actifio Anywhere”
The company announced both deployment options of Sky in the context of a broader product vision than has previously been discussed.

“Actifio Sky is already giving our enterprise customers access to data sets they’d never been able to gather, analyse, and protect before, and simplifying the customer deployment model of our cloud service provider partners,” said Actifio founder and CEO Ash Ashutosh.

“Enabling Actifio’s technology to run on a virtual appliance has been a key milestone in our platform vision right from the start. With the launch of this platform extension, we’re demonstrating the depth and breadth of our underlying technology, and taking an important step toward letting an even broader range of customers across every geography, vertical, and market segment tap the power of Actifio’s copy data virtualisation model in whatever form makes the most sense for them; As a fully integrated appliance leveraging bundled, existing, or third-party storage; as a virtual appliance which can be deployed readily into the edge or the cloud; or as a cloud-based PaaS, available on demand and accessible through any device. We call this vision ‘Actifio Anywhere,’ and it points to the exciting range of Actifio products and services customers will see us introduce to the market over the coming months and years.“

“As an industry leader in DR and BC, we strive to work with the most innovative companies, like Actifio – a pioneer in copy data virtualization, to bring exceptional service to our customers,” commented Souvik Choudhury, VP of recovery services product management, Sungard Availability Services. “Actifio provides our mutual customers with a way to free their data from underlying infrastructure with a compelling economic proposition. We look forward to introducing this new product to our portfolio, to help manage our customer’s data wherever it resides – on premise or in the cloud.”

“At the core of our crowdsourcing innovation, virtual technology and operational efficiencies is data. The technology solutions that power our ability to access and present information to our call-center teams are mission critical to our business,” said Martin Ingram, CIO, Arise Virtual Solutions, “We are implementing Actifio Sky and are leveraging it together with our central Actifio CDS solution for better service levels at a lower cost than any other solution on the market today. This new innovation from Actifio further validates and extends our initial investment in copy data virtualization.”

“Our experience with Actifio Sky has truly been remarkable. We were able to deploy it in less than an hour and began replicating the protected data back to our datacenter soon after,” said Randy Bagby, senior systems engineer, Triad Retail Media, LLC. “This gave us local access to remote data that we’d frankly never been able to quickly access before. Going forward it will enable us to improve our ability to not only protect but access this important data when and where we need it. The impact of that in our business will be significant.”

“Copy data virtualization represents a fundamental shift in approach to business agility and resiliency as IT professionals begin to think in terms of data management rather than ‘siloed’ backup/recovery, application dev/test, business-continuity, analytics, disaster-recovery and archiving operations,” said Dave Simpson, senior analyst, 451 Research. “Combining Actifio CDS’s proven ability with Actifio Sky’s rapid deployment at remote sites or in the cloud, users can now manage all their application data from a single platform, wherever application data may reside, transforming copy data from a liability into a strategic business advantage.”

“As the amount of data managed by organizations continues to grow, the cost and complexity of copy-centric activities like backup and DR continues to rise,” said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, ESG. “Actifio has hit upon the obvious solution – helping companies make fewer copies of data and maintain fewer silos. Now with Sky, it has eliminated any remaining barriers to data mobility, minimizing cost and complexity while delivering data copying, protection and restoration even as companies shift enterprise workloads into the cloud.”

“Companies have to protect and manage their data as efficiently and effectively as possible in a new economy driven by requirements for 24/7 access. But in a quest to meet service-level objectives, generating multiple copies of primary data has become the norm for businesses, costing them roughly $46 billion in 2014 and consuming 65% of external storage systems capacity,” said Laura DuBois, VP, IDC. “Getting that spending under control while also maintaining business agility will be imperative for companies, and Actifio strikes at the root of this problem with Actifio Sky, offering a single platform for businesses to manage copies of data efficiently, maintaining service levels while creating significant cost savings. Whether apps live on-premise, at remote sites or in the cloud, Actifio’s customers now can easily capture, manage and use the data for multiple purposes while reducing cost and complexity.”