Actifio Achieves Near-SSD Performance at Cost of Object Storage

DR from public cloud backups no longer requires a choice between accepting slow recovery times and paying the high costs of SSD storage.

According to a technical validation report by Enterprise Strategy Group, relying on Actifio to backup and recover a 1TB SQL Server database using low-cost object storage on Google Cloud Platform provided 95% of the performance of SSD at 88% lower cost.

The new findings have been the subject of a session during Actifio Data Driven 2020 virtual event on September 15-16: The Next Normal, led by ESG’s Brian Garrett and Actifio co-founder David Chang.

Actifio takes an entirely different approach compared with both legacy data management vendors and hyper-converged backup appliance providers. In a blog titled The Snowflake of Data Management, Actifio explains how it achieves these results with an architectural approach that is similar to data warehouse innovator Snowflake.

“Whether you are a CIO, VP of IT, or a database administrator (DBA),” the ESG report states, “You are looking at ways to reduce costs while ensuring the performance, resilience, and integrity of your high-performance databases like SQL Server, SAP HANA, and Oracle. If your organization is looking to streamline data protection for your SQL Server databases and optimize DR, then ESG believes that you should consider the technical and economic advantages of Actifio and Google Cloud Storage.“

ESG modeled and compared the costs that could be expected when deploying a backup and DR plan with Actifio compared to legacy methods where backups are replicated to a DR location, reconstituted, then presented to an online server instance. ESG completed a similar study using an SAP HANA database on Google Cloud in July, with similarly results.

The study’s author, ESG senior validation analyst Tony Palmer, summarized some of the key findings: “In just 90 minutes, Actifio completed the first full backup and replicated to Nearline storage in the remote GCP region. From this point on, Actifio backed up and replicated in an incremental-forever manner with application consistency. This shrinks the backup window and enables a tighter RPO, especially important for large SQL Server databases. The recovery for the 965GB database took just five and a half minutes from start to finish.“

ESG’s Data Protection Cloud Strategies report found that, while cloud-based data protection has become mainstream, only 37% of organizations send secondary copies of their data to public cloud services for non-protection business use cases such development, testing and analytics. Among the top barriers or challenges identified for re-using secondary data for these business purposes were cost and deployment complexity.

ESG’s Palmer continued:  “Actifio has a ‘VMware Storage VMotion’-like migration feature in the cloud called ‘Mount & Migrate.’ Once turned on post-mount and -recovery, this feature-while users are accessing the database-starts copying blocks from the mounted virtual volume to the desired storage tier. Once the copy is done, the volume can be switched to the new storage tier for the SQL Server database with minimal downtime, less than a minute in the testing we observed.“

The validation testing confirmed: 

• Ease of use to deploy and protect SQL Server databases
• Ability to use nearline object storage for DR copies with equivalent performance to the production environment, a significant capability for performance-sensitive applications like SQL Server
• Automated policy-based backup, replication, and DR resulted in a 3-year DR infrastructure cost reduction of 88%