Improving Data Protection with Data Virtualization – Actifio Briefing Note

Anyone in IT these days is painfully aware of the challenge organizations face dealing with ever-increasing amounts of data they need to properly store and protect. The irony is that the majority of data growth is not just the new data per se but the multiple copies of data the organization needs to meet many specific needs such as daily backups, snapshots, copies that feed analytics systems, disaster recovery (DR), and test/dev work, to name just a few. In many cases the ratio of copy data to the original are approximately 20 to 1.

The Real Problem

In order to store, protect and distribute all this data, organizations invested heavily in expensive, complicated storage solutions. Storage systems eventually evolved to provide features that address limitations in data protection solutions such as long intervals between backups, long backup windows and lengthy recovery times. Features like RAID, Erasure Coding, replication and snapshots provide data protection while deduplication and compression reduce the data footprint.