Jason Brown and Jay Livens discuss instant recovery from public cloud followed by a white-boarding session.
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 at Actifio.
Jason Brown: So today we are talking about Instant Recovery from Public Cloud. So Jay, what would you say are some challenges out there today with solutions when they are trying to recover from the cloud?
Jay Livens: You know, the biggest challenge often is time, because you are backing up the data, you are often taking snapshots, if you want to get the snapshots back you got to copy them back from EBS into a new volume, and that can take time. And so it means that the downtime when you want to do recovery can be lengthy. It’s also because often data can be duplicated. It can be actually memory intensive as well which further adds to the cost and the time associated with that.
Jason Brown: Yes, some big challenges definitely. So here at Actifio we’ve got a solution out there. So how would you say our backup and recovery solution can help with this instant recovery from the cloud?
Jay Livens: Well, we do it very differently. Unlike traditional solutions where you have to move all the data before we can access it, we provide the ability to basically instantly mount the data without any data movement. We provide a LUN which is the data, we provide pointers to the data where we’re storing and instantly that data is available in a read/write format. So whether you have a terabyte database or a 100-terabyte database, it simply takes a few minutes — superfast and very efficient.
Jason Brown: Sweet. So what would you say are some of the key benefits for the Actifio solution?
Jay Livins: Well, the biggest thing is the minimization of downtime. If you have a problem and things are happening, the last thing you want to do is wait for hours for this rehydration and data movement. What you really want to do is minimize it, so your business can be back up and running. With Actifio in a few minutes you are back up and running. And then best of all you do it in a very storage efficient manner, because we’ve already stored the data, you don’t have to make massive amounts of copies that consume massive amount of disk space. So it’s very very easy, very very fast, and very very cost effective.
Jason Brown: It sounds good on paper, but are there any customers out there doing this today?
Jay Livens: We have many. In fact we have one large company who had a large database, it took 72 hours to recover before using Actifio because they have to move all their data back.
Jason Brown: Long time.
Jay Livens: A long time, way too long. Imagine that’s your business right, that’s you know three days, that’s a bit of a problem. Whereas with Actifio like you restore the same database in about five minutes.
Jason Brown: Hold on, 72 hours — three days to five minutes?
Jay Livens: Yes.
Jason Brown: Using Actifio?
Jay Livens: Yes.
Jason Brown: Wow!
Jay Livens: It is a huge meaningful business improvement particularly on recovery and instant access.
Jason Brown: It sounds like it. So if you want to learn more Jay is going to do a whiteboard session which you will be able to check out actually the architecture of how Actifio performs instant recovery from the cloud. Thanks for watching.
Whiteboard session with Jay
Jay Livens: Hi, it’s Jay from Actifio here talking about Instant Recovery in the Cloud. Now the first thing to remember when using Actifio in the cloud is that Actifio is cloud agnostic. We support the major cloud providers including Amazon, Azure, Google, IBM. So if you are in the cloud we likely support your technology. Now the way it works is simple. You are running an application in infrastructure-as-a-service, say it’s a database. You would install the connector; it would then back up or send data to Actifio. We send one full backup and then incrementals thereafter; very efficient. But most importantly what happens if you have an outage? Well, we have technology that allows you to create these point-in-time images on either traditional block storage or in object storage. Now in a scenario where you lose your primary volume, you can simply use Actifio and Actifio will automatically present a previous point in time back to the production volume and allow you to get back up and running in minutes.
So now what we’ve done essentially is take a large database — this could be a terabyte, this could be 10 terabytes, it could be 50 terabytes. And in simply minutes you get the ability to mount it in a fully read/write consistent manner. And since this is captured in an incremental-forever format and we capture various point in times, you have the ability to roll back to any previous point in time that you want to automate and simplify that process of recovery. So as you can see, using Actifio technology in the cloud we deliver the ability to provide the fastest recovery or the smallest overhead. Because we are not doing complex data modifications like traditional like most de-dup engines require. So we don’t need a lot of compute or CPU or other things. We can simply present the productive volume directly from the Actifio appliance and the application will be back and running in minutes. Thanks.