News Article
One-click cloud DR? Actifio says, ‘copy that’
June 24, 2014
More than three years after coming out with its copy data storage software, Actifio is expanding the use cases for its data protection technology. Actifio launched Actifio Sky platform in May as a remote office companion to its Copy Data Storage (CDS) core data center product, and this week built on those platforms with a Resiliency Director service for disaster recovery.
The goal for Resiliency Director is to provide one-click failover of heavily virtualized environments, using the cloud or a co-location as a DR site.
Resiliency Director consists of virtual appliance data collectors on the primary site that discovers VMware virtual machines and vApps, and CDS systems at the primary and DR sites. The CDS software performs deduplication and asynchronous replication of VMs, keeping them in a ready state for DR. When there is a failure (or DR test), Resiliency Director software at the DR site orchestrates storage, compute, network and data, and enables full application recovery.
Actifio claims it can enable application recovery faster than anybody else because of its granular understanding of VMs and vApp reduces the size of the data sets and it only has to rehydrate changed deduped blocks when making restores. Also, a read cache in CDS reduces latency and improves IOPS in the recovery stack.
Customers can organize VMs and vApps in application groups and prioritize the order in which they are recovered.
“Our customers said they wanted DR to operate in a much more granular VM level,” Actifio VP of product management Brian Reagan said. “And they want to orchestrate recoveries without relying on array-based replication that adds cost.”
Reagan said Actifio plans to add support for more hypervisors – Microsoft Hyper-V is likely the next – and physical machines to Resiliency Director.
SunGard is already using Actifio Resiliency Director for its Recover2Cloud service. This expands the vendors’ partnership, which already includes SunGard’s Managed vaulting Backup for Actifio service. SunGard VP of product management Souvik Choudhury said Recover2Cloud will be available as a standalone service and integrated with other SunGard services.