Actifio Resiliency Director

Actifio, Inc., the copy data virtualization company, announced Actifio Resiliency Director, a solution for non-disruptive application recovery and test environment creation from the datacenter to the cloud.

Working in conjunction with Actifio CDS and Actifio Sky for public, private or hybrid cloud-based recovery, it allows enterprises to restore critical business functionality faster and cheaper than before possible, orchestrating compute, network, and data at a cloud service provider or enterprise DR site and validating the result.

In live tests using a commodity-type infrastructure, provided by Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS), a provider of managed recovery services, Actifio demonstrated its ability to recover 100’s of VMs in less than 20 minutes. Users could increase recovery times further by using higher performance application infrastructure.

To date more than 400 enterprises and cloud service providers across 34 countries have chosen Actifio’s Copy Data Virtualization platform and now Resiliency Director for business agility, resiliency, and access to the cloud for their most critical application platforms including SAP, Oracle, VMware, HP-UX, AIX, iSeries, and Microsoft.

Building on 30 years of delivering HA services and with approximately 8,000 customers, Sungard AS has pioneered launching a new Resiliency Director-based service.

“Sungard AS’ new Recover2Cloud services leverage the power of Actifio’s copy data virtualization platform and Actifio Resiliency Director to deliver a differentiated suite of cloud resiliency offerings,” said Souvik Choudhury, VP of product management, recovery services, Sungard. “We’re excited by the demand for these new capabilities because it helps our customers achieve many of their strategic priorities, from a single platform.”

Resiliency Director leverages Actifio’s core Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology and extends the Copy Data Virtualization platform. Just as other technologies have virtualized compute and networking, Actifio virtualizes data – decoupling increasingly strategic enterprise data from increasingly commoditized enterprise infrastructure. `

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

“In order to support business operations resilience, a growing number of organizations must now support aggressive IT service recovery times of less than four hours and IT service availability levels of 99.5% or better,” noted Gartner research VP John Morency. “In addition to IT service failover management, IT service continuity managers must ensure that their data center technology and management process portfolio is well-rounded so that IT service continuity management is both effective and sustainable.”

Using Resiliency Director, enterprises are able to improve application availability and resiliency, eliminating errors that are often introduced while undertaking manual tasks to recover applications. Because the DR process – from testing to actual execution – can be thoroughly automated, the time spent on recovering large numbers of applications and VMs is collapsed from days to minutes. As a result, Actifio helps companies focus on managing their applications, not only their recoveries.

The first of a new family of services, Resiliency Director builds on the capabilities of the Actifio CDS and Actifio Sky platforms.

Offered as a service as part of the CDS and Sky platforms, Resiliency Director provides:

• One-click recoveries of mission critical applications
• Dedup Async Replication for bandwidth efficient data transport and improved RPO
• Application VM-based (versus storage-based) recovery for granular control
• Automatic discovery of VMs, vApps, and all dependencies
• Recovery plan automation for operational efficiency and improved RTO
• QoS driven VM recovery prioritization
• Non-disruptive, automated DR testing
• Automated provisioning/de-provisioning of compute, network and storage for recovery or pre-production/staging tests
• Extensible and customizable recoveries using script injection with customer/CSP scripts
• Managed at VM-level vs. LUN level for faster and more granular recovery planning/testing

“Actifio Resiliency Director is part of a portfolio of services designed to make it even easier for our customers and cloud service providers to capture, manage and use data – delivering unprecedented service levels,” said Ash Ashutosh, CEO, Actifio. “It is no longer acceptable for businesses to spend massive amounts of time and money – or worse, ignore all together – managing business critical processes like ensuring data is recoverable in the event of an application failure. Information is the lifeblood of today’s enterprises and Actifio is pioneering platforms and solutions to address data management requirements.”