Actifio’s 5.1 software release represents an important milestone in the product evolution, as customer and partner-inspired features are brought to market. With the 5.1 release, we have announced new and enhanced functionality spans three critical areas – Business Continuity, Data Governance, and Service Management. It’s just one of the recent announcements that covers how Actifio is making copy data storage easy.
Business Continuity
Actifio 5.1 expands the near-instant data access capabilities of the copy data storage platform with additional functionality that provides added control for testing and maintaining a resilient application infrastructure. As part of the patented Dedup Async functionality, now customers can Test Failover, to run non-disruptive disaster recovery tests, as often as needed, using virtual copies of production. [Make sure to check out these great video demos of Automated Failover Testing and Automated Failback Sync] As these tests are run directly from the Actifio platform, they do not have any impact on production systems. In addition, with Failback and Syncback, in the event of an actual failover to a remote site, any uniquely changed application data from DR site is automatically synched once the primary site is ready to resume operations.
Actifio 5.1 also introduces an optional Bare Metal Recovery feature, to deliver protection of physical system state of Windows and Linux machines. With Actifio’s Bare Metal, customers can get servers back up and running in event of failure quickly and meet aggressive Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). The ability to protect and restore both physical system state and data based on SLA, and restore to similar or dissimilar hardware, helps address environments with a mix of physical and virtual systems with a common toolset.
Data Governance
Enterprises continue to apply greater emphasis on security and control of application data, particularly in the age of Big Data, when it seems that every data element is saved for future use. Actifio 5.1 delivers important new features in the area of reporting and audit, particularly when it comes to the role-based use of SLAs. Now, administrators have a more in-depth understanding of who is using they system, what SLA changes have occurred and who has applied SLAs to applications. In addition, Actifio continues to enhance the data integrity validation inherent in the product, delivering greater assurance of the protection and recoverability of data over long-term retentions, while improving the performance. In addition,
In spite of continued forecasts of the death of tape in the data center– noise generated largely from disk-based solutions vendors – tape remains a vital component in many enterprises. Actifio 5.1 advances the integration with tape output, leveraging industry standard open formats to avoid vendor lock-in.
Actifio 5.1 also introduces LDAP and Active Directory support, particularly important for those enterprises with single sign-on initiatives.
Service Management
Actifio has partnered with some of the world’s largest service providers. Their input in terms of running large-scale Actifio environments is invaluable in the continued development of the product. The functionality requests are equally valuable for enterprises running internal IT-as-a-Service operations. In both cases, Service Management functionality helps lower costs, improve usability and operations, and speed new service introduction.
Actifio 5.1 introduces auto-updates, which allows simplified management of distributed locations. A number of enhancements have also been made to the system monitoring and VPN access controls, streamlining the operations of Actifio regardless of scale. In addition, as deployments grow, the volume of system generated information can overwhelm a system administrator. With new alert correlation and processing, Actifio improves the signal-to-noise ratio, focusing on actionable intelligence rather than just activity.