Let’s compare Actifio backup and recovery versus other solutions, while using cloud object storage.
Cloud object storage is getting very popular as a target storage medium for short term, medium term and long term backups, because of 11 nines of durability and also extremely low cost. So many enterprises are wondering how they can reduce or eliminate the storage on-premises and leverage as much as possible the cloud object storage.
Other solutions, pretty much every other vendor, always need a local copy and then they can replicate to the cloud object storage. Actifio is the only platform that can totally eliminate the on-premises storage and directly backup the VMware virtual machines into the cloud object storage, and that too in an incremental forever manner, which means after the first full backup it does incremental forever.
This totally eliminates your storage expense which is good for certain virtual machines, not suitable for all workloads. Enterprises still want a local copy and then replicate to the cloud object storage. Other vendors, just like Actifio, they all – we all can backup – have a local copy and then replicate to cloud object storage. However, the major difference comes in the way the replication is done. Other vendors de-duplicate the data, and then they want to replicate to the cloud object storage. Now de-duplicated data, the garbage collection in the cloud object storage is extremely complicated and introduces a lot of API cost.
What they end up doing is a full backup, followed by a few incrementals, and then another full backup, pretty much every week. Now what this full backup does is it increases your bandwidth requirements and hence your bandwidth costs with the rest of the products. However, with Actifio, after the local copy is done for those specific workloads, it always replicates in an incremental forever manner and hence reduces your bandwidth cost by up to 20X.
And last but not the least, now that the backups are stored in the cloud object storage, how do you recover. With other products and Actifio as well, you can use the catalog search and restore files and folders, you can restore the entire virtual machine from the cloud object storage back into on-premises, where the data transfer movement is involved. However, Actifio is the only platform that allows you to instantly mount from the cloud object storage back to on-premises and recover the virtual machines.
When you mount and bring up the virtual machine, there is no data transfer involved. Only when the virtual machine is accessed or the data base is accessed, that’s when the data is pulled on demand from the cloud object to on-premises. What this does is it reduces your RTO dramatically and allows you to access virtual machines or databases instantly practically in minutes.
To summarize, the Actifio architecture allows you to eliminate the storage expense on premises, it reduces your bandwidth cost by up to 20X as compared to the other products, and it reduces your RTO practically down to a few minutes for hundreds of virtual machines or multi-terabyte databases.
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