News Article
Actifio One adds hybrid cloud storage tier to appliances
February 10, 2015
Actifio has launched Actifio One, a service addition to its existing family of hardware and software appliance data protection and file management products.
Actifio One adds hybrid cloud functionality to the company’s existing offerings, which are based around the slimming down of multiple iterations of files across the organisation to as near one golden copy as possible.
That can mean one golden copy in the case of infrequently used or changed data, but may mean one golden copy plus others in various stages of their lifecycle but which are ultimately synchronised.
Actifio aims its products at the data protection and disaster recovery markets and hopes to replace existing replication products, including at the storage array.
When Actifio is deployed, it discovers all apps and data in the environment. Policies can then be set for data – how many copies, on what tier of storage media they should be kept, and so on.
To date, Actifio has supplied the product as software, virtual appliance or hardware appliance on an x86 server. Now it has added the cloud as a tier, with users able to orchestrate policies for the location of data between in-house and cloud storage, as well as to manage failover between the two.
The move is another example of a trend towards hybrid cloud operations from a wide variety of suppliers. A wide range of storage and backup-related suppliers have moved towards hybrid cloud functionality in the past year.
That’s because hybrid cloud as a mode of operation – where in-house storage is supplemented by cloud storage – recognises the limitations but also the opportunities presented by the cloud for data storage.
Currently, cloud storage lacks the rapid access times required for primary production data use cases. But the cloud can serve well for data with less stringent latency requirements. Hence the rise of hybrid cloud approaches where fast in-house storage operates in conjunction with off-site cloud.