By Brian Reagan, VP Product Strategy & Business Development – A story was published last week on The Register, “Actifio And The Curious Affair Of The AIX Copy Reduction Tech”. A customer’s issue getting Actifio’s AIX connector operational triggered the brief article. At the time, I was traveling throughout Australia and New Zealand and was with some of our IBM Power/AIX experts. They were surprised to hear of the issue; particularly given their experiences helping several customers implement Actifio for AIX.
Admittedly, it’s hard to receive negative feedback, but doing so is the only way you can build great products. Actifio takes customer input very seriously. The direct pipeline to the voice of customer is how an emerging technology company is able to maintain relevance and impact. It’s what engenders trust and, ultimately loyalty. It’s the only way to build a sustainable, high-growth business. Just ask Amazon, or Target, or BMW, or JetBlue, or any of the segment-leading companies relentlessly focused on customer feedback.
AIX support, via in-band data capture, has been part of the product since version 5.0. In our 6.0 product release – announced just before VMworld 2013 – that support expanded to include a connector to facilitate in-band and out-of-band capture of application-consistent snapshots of applications running on VIOS configurations. In addition, the full discovery of the AIX environment – all Virtual IO servers and LPARs – was automated by querying the Hardware Management Console (HMC). If you’re interested in a walkthrough of how this functionality is enabled by Actifio, one of our resident gurus published several excellent videos detailing how to create application consistent snapshots and perform instant mounts of DB2 in an AIX 6.1 environment.
Still, the best way to understand and appreciate the power of Actifio’s copy data management platform is to use it. To that end, we’d invite anyone interested in Actifio for AIX to conduct an open testing of the functionality, our site or yours. We’ll publish the results of the testing on our website. In the meantime, please keep the feedback coming. We’re committed to continuous improvement in every aspect of the company and its that feedback that guides us.