
Backup, Recovery, and Migration to IBM Cloud.
OVERVIEW
Backup, Recovery, and Migration of large scale on-premises workloads running in VMs, Physical Servers, and enterprise Databases to IBM Cloud.
Most enterprises want to reduce their data center footprint for Backup and DR infrastructure.
Actifio software enables enterprises to protect on-premises workloads by backing them up to IBM Cloud, perform on-demand recoveries and migrations.
Actifio also protects IBM Cloud resident workloads with backup and replication to remote cloud regions and on-demand recovery.
CHALLENGES
Enterprises struggle with large Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) to recover VMs and databases in IBM Cloud.
Most solutions have no physical server recovery in IBM Cloud.
Legacy offerings perform weekly full backups, for databases and physical servers, which leads to large Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
Most solutions need a local backup copy and can’t backup directly to cloud object storage resulting in high on-premises infrastructure costs.
Enterprises can store backups in IBM Cloud object storage but there is no instant recovery from IBM Cloud Object Storage.
To protect cloud resident workloads, most solutions demand too much 24×7 compute and memory, resulting in high Total Cost of Ownership.
Enterprises are concerned about cloud security as well, especially end-to-end data immutability with WORM capabilities.
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HOW Actifio HELPS
For all workloads, including databases and physical servers, Actifio delivers low RTO with instant recovery and low RPO with incremental forever backup.
For low priority VMware VMs, Actifio can backup directly to IBM Cloud Object Storage resulting in low on-premises infrastructure costs. Enterprises benefit from instant recovery even from Cloud Object Storage.
Actifio can migrate enterprise workloads from on-premises to IBM Cloud and continue to protect those workloads in IBM Cloud after migration.
Enterprises can also provision rapid database clones on-demand in IBM Cloud for Test Data Management. A single solution for all these use cases for both on-premises and IBM Cloud resident workloads, lowers the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
Additionally, Actifio is integrated with IBM Cloud’s WORM API, ensuring that data cannot be deleted directly by a cloud administrator until the retention period has expired.
Media
Frequently Asked Questions.
Yes. Actifio can backup physical machines to IBM Cloud. It can also recover the entire Windows or Linux physical server as a IBM Cloud VM. As part of this recovery, Actifio can also perform instant mount and recovery of the non-system volumes and databases, thus deliver instant recovery in the cloud.
Yes. Actifio can perform instant recovery from IBM Cloud Object Storage, as well as IBM Cloud Block Storage.
There are two forms of replication from on-premises to IBM Cloud.
For mission-critical workloads, enterprises use replication between Actifio Sky on-premises to Actifio Sky in IBM Cloud VM.
For Tier 2 and Tier 3 VMs, enterprises can back up on-premises VMware VMs directly to IBM Cloud Object storage, thus reducing on-premises storage costs.
Yes.
Actifio performs incremental forever backups of SQL using its own proprietary change block tracking technology and leverages VSS snapshots for database consistency. Yet, each point-in-time incremental backup results in a full virtual copy, i.e., no extra storage is consumed for the virtual full copy, and you can recover a full database without having to apply incremental data to full backups.
Actifio Sky then mounts the point-in-time backup image (which is in native SQL format and not a traditional dump) to the recovery server over iSCSI and recovers the database in minutes. Based on the specified point in time, it automatically replays any transaction logs that are needed.
Actifio does not use the BackInt database dumps, and instead relies upon the SAP HANA native snapshot API (‘HDBSQL’ calls to create a global savepoint for application-consistent backup). Actifio performs incremental forever backups. Yet, each point-in-time incremental backup is synthesized to be a full virtual copy, i.e., no extra storage is consumed for the virtual full copy, and you can recover a full database without having to apply all incremental backups.
Actifio Sky then mounts the point-in-time backup image (which is in native HANA Data format and not a traditional dump) to the recovery server over FC/iSCSI/NFS and recovers the database (using HANA API ‘recoverSys.py’) in minutes.
IBM Cloud users can provision dozens of thin-clones of the database, in minutes, to Dev / QA / UAT / Analytics environments in IBM Cloud. Actifio does this by reusing backups efficiently to provision thin clones, in minutes, to test environments with almost any configuration.
Yes. DBAs/administrators can use IBM Cloud object storage for long-term data retention. Actifio can replicate backups in an incremental forever manner to a cloud object storage such as IBM Cloud object Storage.