Jason Brown (@FelixNU98) and Jay Livens (@jlivens) discuss instant recovery from Cloud Object Storage
Jason Brown: Hey everyone, I’m Jason Brown, Director of Product Marketing at Actifio.
Jay Livens: And I’m Jay Livens, Senior Director of Product Marketing.
Jason Brown: So today we’re talking about Instant Recovery from Cloud Object Storage. So Jay what would you say are some challenges when you are trying to recover data from the cloud object storage side of the house?
Jay Livens: Jason you know, cloud object storage, people love it, because it is very inexpensive a dollar a gigabyte basis which is really cool. The problem becomes though is that not a lot of applications support it. So you can spend not that much money, but you have a hard time accessing it in a timely manner. So you write the data to it, it becomes difficult to get it back. It often requires substantial compute and rehydration if duplication is involved. And what all of that essentially means, is kind of hard to support and also results in lengthy recovery times if at all if you’re trying to use object storage, a traditional data protection environment.
Jason Brown: Right. What is the point of saving costs if it takes forever to recover?
Jay Livens: Exactly.
Jason Brown: Yeah right. So Actifio, we have a solution that could help customers recover from object storage in the cloud. So tell me a little bit about it.
Jay Livens: So what we do is we integrate object storage into data protection process; then you might think, “Well now the problem with lengthy recoveries again.” Well, we do this really special is we integrate it, we write the data to it, but we have the ability to instantly present volumes out of it, literally 100 terabyte database, five minutes, you can do it. So just in minutes you click and it happens and there is your database read/write accessible directly available out of object storage.
Jason Brown: Oh wow, that’s great. I mean especially when to be able to save costs but then be able to get it instantly, that is perfect. So I think I just mentioned one of the benefits, so what are some of the other benefits of this?
Jay Livens: What it really does is people have object storage, they love the idea, but they can’t figure out how do I really get the maximum benefit out of it. So what you really get is the benefits of very low cost of object storage with the speed and ability of instant recovery from Actifio. And you could do that locally or even in a more interesting way, you could even mount cloud based object storage and then recover your application instantly in the cloud. So it dramatically changes how you can store from an economics standpoint and how you can recover it whether locally or in the cloud. So it changes really the game of how you use object storage.
Jason Brown: So this sounds good on the paper, it almost sounds too good to be true you know if I must be honest here. So is there a customer out there that is actually using Actifio for this use case?
Jay Livens: Sure. We had a large consulting who used traditional storage and they liked that but they said, this got to be something better because the costs are adding up to hundreds of terabytes of data. So what they decided to do is go to the cloud. So they used cloud object storage to essentially reduce the footprint required by 80%. Yet at the same time they could do that while maintaining the service levels with the ability to instant mount directly from the object storage that’s in the cloud. So it’s a very powerful way to change the economics and actually maintain or even in some instances improve service levels.
Jason Brown: Yeah, it sounds really they had their cake and they got to eat it too. You know what I mean?
Jay Livens: Absolutely, I like it.
Jason Brown: So that was how Actifio can help with instant recovery from object storage. Jay is going to do a whiteboard video of it, you can check that a little bit later. Thanks for watching.
Whiteboard Session:
Jay Livens: Hi, it’s Jay. In this video we are going to talk about instant recovery from cloud object storage. In this case what we are looking at is an environment in the cloud. We have our application and its supported underlying data. So it is a database. We capture that data in an incremental forever fashion in an application [Indiscernible] [00:03:45] manner. So what that means is the Actifio appliance is setting SLAs and is capturing data whatever frequency you want, every 15 minutes, every hour, every two hours, once a day, whatever you want. We can store the copies in an S3 Compatible Object Storage. That could be traditional S3, it could be on-premises options like cloud object storage from IBM or Scality, or it could be anything in the cloud you like. And once we store them now they are protected and any of those copies are available for instant access.
So let’s say then you have a problem, this volume is lost, oh no, what do you do? We have the ability then to mount a volume directly from object storage through the Actifio clients and then present that back to the application server. It is important to realize that this new volume here is fully read/write enabled and reflects the state of the application upon the last time we captured it. So now the application is back up and running in minutes directly from object storage. Our data is there, we are operational, and we are running. So in this way what we’ve done is taking an S3 compatible storage and made it instant access and enabled instant read/write recoveries for data stored by the Actifio appliance.
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