Backup as a technology was introduced many decades ago. Since then a lot has changed with how applications are created and hosted- but the backup industry has undergone only a few incremental changes. As a result, enterprises spend millions of dollars on secondary storage to overcome the tape-centric nature of backup technology, and yet are still stuck with legacy directives that are limited to sow and complex recoveries.
On World Backup Day, it is time to look to the future of backup. There are a few obvious reasons to leave the old behind such as accelerating recovery from security events like ransomware attacks. But is there a new approach to backup that can fundamentally change how businesses protect and recover information while also enabling higher value tasks such as DevOps, Analytics and Migration? Can a backup software go beyond doing just backups?
Actifio’s unique data centric approach to backup is fundamentally different and adds value to organizations by helping them repurpose the backup data for numerous other use cases
Actifio’s 5 key benefits in a Cloud-First World
- Scalable Instant Recovery in Minutes: Actifio captures and stores the data in its native format, even in object storage in public cloud. This allows for not just instant recovery of data but also allows it at scale. So for example, if you are backing up 100 VMware VMs with Actifio to AWS, you can instantly recover all of them in a few minutes automatically in an orchestrated way as EC2 VMs in AWS.
- Rewind and recover instantly: All of Actifio’s backups are synthetic fulls, so the time it takes to recover a PIT is very small. Actifio presents a point in time copy as a virtual LUN to the recovery server and hence the RTO is as low as minutes for even a multi TB database. For example: Users can get read/write instant access to a 5TB Oracle database in object storage within minutes. The ability to get operations back up in minutes is extremely critical to business continuity and Actifio helps users achieve that seamlessly in public cloud.
- Application consistent incremental forever backup: Actifio performs only one initial full backup and the rest are incrementals. This helps in achieving an RPO of up to 1 hour, thereby allowing users to protect their applications more frequently. This reduces the amount of impact that the business has to suffer in times of a downtime/outage.
- Multi year retention with Instant Access: With Actifio, users can tier the non-mission critical applications and VMs to low cost object storage for long term retention while maintaining instant recoverability. If users want access data stored in object storage,, they can simply spin up an Actifio Sky appliance in the public cloud and present a backed up image as a virtual LUN to the recovery server instantly. This helps users in cases such as audits or legal compliance where organizations are required to recover a part of their older data.
- Instant Data Provisioning for DevOps: Actifio accelerates application development lifecycle by providing the users with direct access to data through self-service DevOps functionality. Data is seamlessly moved, replicated and managed across central, remote and cloud environments, removing the limits of location-based application design. Workflow, filters and data masking can be applied to customize the data management solution to meet the needs of software Dev & QA teams. This can help make software developers more productive, compress software development cycles and improve users’ time-to-market.
Actifio is fundamentally different from other backup vendors because it decouples data from underlying infrastructure to deliver accelerated resiliency and agility benefits. By capturing data in its native format, called the Actifio immutable golden copy, Actifio makes the data seamlessly available across the IT spectrum from traditional data center to private or public cloud, rendering it not just for instant recovery within public cloud but also for scenarios such as DevOps and analytics.
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