Technology
Virtualization comes to Data Management
Actifio delivers Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platforms that optimize the management of copies of production data. A PAS platform is deployed in each domain or physical site where data needs to be managed.
Actifio PAS is based on patented Virtual Data Pipeline™ (VDP) technology, delivering dramatically enhanced business availability by eliminating backup and restore windows and the creation of virtual point-in-time copies of data on-demand, for use by any business application. Integrating data duplication, network and processor utilization optimization, Actifio provides the most efficient way to manage data growth while solving your biggest IT challenges around information protection and availability.
By introducing virtualization into data management, Actifio PAS delivers an application-centric, policy-driven solution that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure. The result is a single, radically simple solution that can reduce costs up to 90% and more efficiently manage all copies of production data for virtual, physical or cloud IT infrastructure for on-premise, hosted, hybrid or SaaS deployments of applications.
Virtual Data Pipeline Basics
The near-ubiquitous deployment of server virtualization, rapid adoption of disk for storing copies of data and commoditization of disk systems enables an opportunity for better management of data. Actifio pioneered Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology to virtualize management of copies of production data, eliminating redundancies and re-purposing unique data for multiple data management applications.
VDP is a distributed object file system, virtualizing the core primitives of data management: copy, store, move and restore, and enables instant creation of virtual copies of point-in-time data from the collection of unique blocks of data. A single solution can now be deployed to replace one or more of backup software, disaster recovery, business continuity or test and development tools and be used as a platform for search, compliance and analytics tools. By introducing virtualization into data management, Actifio delivers an application-centric, SLA-driven solution that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure.
How Is Virtual Data Pipeline Different from Data Deduplication?
The legacy approach has been to deploy a point tool for each business requirement to manage data; backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, test and development, compliance and analytics, each of which is a vertically integrated application that copies, stores, moves and restores its own copy of data. Each of these applications has varying requirements for frequency of data capture, retention time and physical locations where the data needs to be stored.
For example, the Snapshot tool could make copies once an hour and store it in raw format. Backup software makes a daily copy at night and stores it in deduplicated format. Each of these tools copies the same data from different intervals, retains for different periods and stores in different formats.
While data deduplication technology optimizes the capacity of data managed by a backup application, or within a single silo, the redundant data across the silos results in up to 120 duplicated copies of data. VDP manages a unique copy of data across the various silos, while optimizing its capacity, network and CPU utilization every stage.
VDP virtualizes the core primitives of data management: copy, store, move and restore, and consists of an Object File System that enables instant creation of virtual copies of point-in-time data from a collection of unique blocks of data.
In the earlier example, VDP would involve making efficient copies hourly based on change block tracking. These copies are kept in raw format to meet the instant restore requirements. A 24th copy is then promoted to become the daily backup and moved into the deduplicated and compressed format for longer period of retention. The 7th of these “daily” copies is promoted to become the “weekly” backup and so on. The entire pipelining process is defined by the SLA policy associated with the data and assigned by the application administrator.
A single solution can now be deployed to replace one or more of backup software, disaster recovery, business continuity or test and development tools and be used as a platform for search, compliance and analytics tools.
How Is Virtual Data Pipeline Similar to Virtualization?
Server virtualization abstracts the core instruction set of an x86 processor and the peripheral components of a server enabling operating systems and applications to operate without any change, while introducing the benefits of simplicity, flexibility and improved utilization.
VDP is akin to virtualization of data management, wherein a single platform abstracts the core primitives of data management, allows for the re-use of data and delivers the same operational and business benefits.
