Every week, it seems like I meet someone in IT who says, in so many words, “we’re now a software company in the (blank) industry”. In the last month alone, I’ve heard that at an automotive manufacturer, a national bank, and a utility company. What scares these people the most is the acknowledgement that they aren’t really software companies. Structurally and philosophically they are still auto companies, banks, and utilities. Their competitors, on the other hand, are built-from-the-ground-up actual software companies. They’re the new disruptors. These firms move fast, with a sense-and-respond approach to innovation and customer engagement. A CIO at that bank said he wasn’t focused on the bank across the street; he was concerned about FinTech startups in the Valley eating his lunch.
Welcome to the rise of the digital enterprise, where apps are the new model of customer engagement and data is the new currency. It’s increasingly clear that a company’s ability to generate high-quality apps, more rapidly, is a critical differentiator. Ultimately, agility will decide between winners and losers in any market.
But, as the saying goes, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Challenges abound to meet these time pressures. Data payloads have become so large they’re overwhelming the technologies in place to manage them. Data is also far more distributed than it’s ever been. And the processes in place to deliver data to the right team, on schedule, are largely manual.
The digital enterprise needs a new solution to power its transformation. And that’s why Actifio partnered with Pure Storage to deliver the AppFlash DevOps Platform, which combines Actifio’s pioneering copy data virtualization with Pure Storage’s industry-leading all-flash array. The result is high-performance, scalable platform that accelerates test data management in the enterprise.
AppFlash takes an application-centric approach to managing data. Featuring deep integration with leading database environments like Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2, as well as hypervisors and file systems, the AppFlash platform can manage a complete application stack, individual database objects, or anything in between. These images are virtualized, collapsing access and refresh times, regardless of data size, from hours/days to minutes. And, as an open platform with a RESTful API, the platform can be seamlessly integrated with an entire DevOps ecosystem – from continuous integration to deployment automation tools.
One of the key features of this platform is the ability to manage and run these virtual images independent of production. That not only avoids any potential contention in the environment, but it also eliminates the single-point-of-failure risk of managing everything on the same array. Since the full read/write instances are virtual, they consume very little storage. And, by powering this test data management automation with Pure’s all-flash array, the ability to serve many, parallel development, test, and pre-production needs, with a consistent quality of service, is assured.
The AppFlash DevOps Platform is a tremendous first step in the partnership between two leading technology companies. It also opens the door for future integration and expansion of value the companies can deliver to their enterprise customers. I, for one, am excited to return to that auto manufacturer, national bank, and utility company to describe how this partnership can help compress their application lifecycle time, reduce data risk, and deliver real economic benefits. In other words, how this new solution will help accelerate their transformation to a high-performing digital enterprise.