VMworld has taken Barcelona by storm. Data Management continues to be a hot topic at the event. Taming the data beast has always been challenging, but more so with the ever increasing amount of data, cloud, and now multi-cloud strategies which customers are embarking on. Organizations continue to look for best of breed approaches for backup, disaster recovery, analytics, and test data management. IBM Cloud and Actifio have further enhanced their partnership with the announcement of Actifio GO on IBM public cloud to address these challenges in the hybrid cloud world.
Actifio GO will help customers:
Streamline infrastructure Costs
As the amount of data continues to grow exponentially, organizations are challenged with ever-shrinking backup windows and restoration SLAs for VMware servers and database workloads like Oracle and SAP HANA. Organizations are also challenged with the ever increasing time required to clone data for testing and analytics. To compound the problem, most solutions linearly increase the costs of infrastructure (i.e. servers, arrays, networking, etc.) in line with data growth. Actifio and IBM public cloud can help in several ways:
- First, Actifio captures VMware data using VADP APIs to provide application-consistent, incremental forever backups which reduces the storage required. This is true for on-premises and IBM Cloud VMware VMs.
- Second, Actifio sends these VMware backups directly to IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS). Actifio can even send them to Cross Region IBM Cloud Object Storage targets – allowing clients to migrate or store data in multiple (3 to be precise) regions simultaneously. There is no need for a local copy first, and no need for a copy on IBM Cloud Block Storage (although that certainly is an option, especially for mission-critical VMs). Anyone who understands cloud object storage will realize that this will significantly reduce costs by eliminating the need for local backup storage.
- Third, you are using your IBM Cloud credentials and account. So, if you have credits with IBM Cloud, you can use them in conjunction with Actifio!
It’s not just CAPEX savings, only. By eliminating local backup storage, Actifio and IBM Cloud reduce the operational burden (i.e. OPEX) associating with managing that infrastructure. We’ve seen customers reduce TCO by 40% using Actifio and IBM public cloud for cloud-based data protection.
Dramatically Reducing RPO/RTO/cloning times
Obviously, it’s great to reduce costs, but if the performance or user experience suffers, then the point is rather moot. Typically, with other vendors, this is the case, as the data written to cloud object storage is either deduplicated or written in a proprietary format, so the recovery and cloning time from IBM Cloud Object Storage is slow. Actifio and IBM public cloud offer a solution that helps dramatically reduce your RPO and RTO. Here’s how:
- As mentioned above, Actifio captures VMware data in an incremental forever manner and sends it directly to cloud obect storage, which significantly reduces RPO.
- Actifio provides instant mount of virtual full copies of captured VMware data, for both recovery and cloning. The same solution can also be availed off for cloning of databases like SAP HANA. Since we are presenting virtual full copies, they can be accessed instantly, even from cloud object storage. Add in the fact that this recovery or clone can be done from any point-in-time, to any location (on-premises or IBM public cloud), and the RTO decreases to a matter of minutes (instead of hours or days). Actifio and IBM Cloud can reduce RTO and cloning times by 90% for your VMware and SAP workloads.
Enhanced Security
With cloud being an integral part of your strategy, it is important that security be an integral part of your overall VMware and data management strategy.
- With Actifio and IBM public cloud, VMware data is encrypted – in transit and at rest.
- Gain peace of mind with a unique WORM integration between Actifio and IBM Cloud that securely protects VMware data from being prematurely deleted by any user or admin (such as an Actifio or IBM Cloud admin).
- Satisfy compliance needs with automated SLAs to retain backups from days to decades based on each customer.
- Use Actifio’s point-in-time instant mount capabilities to recover from ransomware attacks.
- Each customer has their own unique instance of Actifio when using IBM public cloud. Combined with the fact that you’re using your IBM Cloud account, there is no need to worry about unauthorized access to your data.
- Choose your level of VMware data consistency within IBM Cloud. Choose from Regional or Cross Region. If you subscribe to Cross Region, you automatically get protection from Regional Failure. In Regional service, you get protection from datacenter or device failures – because each regional service has 3 datacenters.
Actifio and IBM Cloud can provide you with the most comprehensive solution for your VMware data management needs, whether it is for backup, DR, or cloning for analytics/testing, to enable you to run a streamlined data center and cloud environment.