Cisco HyperFlex & Actifio
OVERVIEW
Cisco and Actifio deliver end-to-end solutions for enterprise copy data management.
Cisco HyperFlex extends the simplicity of hyperconvergence to elevate IT to focus on applications and services that power the enterprise. The Cisco Hyperflex platform natively converges compute, virtualization and storage into a resilient, software-defined solution with rich machine intelligence.
The addition of Actifio blends seamlessly to deliver enterprise data virtualization that accelerates hybrid cloud usage to build higher quality applications faster while improving business resiliency and availability.
CHALLENGES
Enterprises struggle to provide advanced data management for Cisco Hyperflex.
IT organizations large and small struggle to simplify data center infrastructure and operations to gain predictable performance, scalability, and cloud-like consumption. Enterprises are seeking to streamline infrastructure, to lower expenses, to accelerate implementation agility and gain cost-effective and uncomplicated end-to-end data management.
Analytics and DevOps teams regularly require access to the correct and most up-to-date production and test data. APIs must be available to provide easy integration with DevOps toolchains and automation tools, such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or Jenkins. Because enterprises often use multiple point tools to meet their needs for data backup/recovery; operational complexity, and total cost of ownership (TCO) increase while data management is siloed, making compliance challenging to manage.
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HOW Actifio HELPS
Cisco and Actifio have collaborated to provide Service Providers with validated designs for key end-user consumable services that can be offered by an SP on an as-a-service (aaS) basis. These designs help SPs develop and evolve data virtualization services more quickly. Examples include:
Remote Backup-as-a-Service
This design details a Backup & Recovery service to help an SP quickly deploy BaaS for both physical and virtual servers from a customer data center to a cloud service provider’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Targeted at mid-market end-customers with 250-1000 employees, this design includes enterprise data center to SP cloud backup and recovery, where the customer has servers and applications deployed on-premises.
Cloud BaaS
This validated design accelerates a targeted Backup & Recovery service for selected virtual servers in a VPC environment. This offering includes detailed design options for in-cloud (SP-to-SP) backup and restoration of IaaS workloads. In this instance, the Enterprise customer has servers hosted at the SP’s site, and the BaaS is provided between redundant SP sites to include local backup/restore and site survivability.
Advanced BaaS Use Cases
The advanced use cases provide SPs with validated designs and architecture details that can accelerate the implementation of new BaaS offerings in their catalog. For example, SPs can provide cloud based on-demand and self-service access to backup copies for DevOps and analytics capabilities. Designs also show the way to virtual data management capabilities that enable Test/Dev functionality for an enterprise cloud customer.
Frequently Asked Questions.
Most often SP challenges in cloud data protection are related to their existing tool sets as well as with the difficulty of maintaining consistent enterprise SLAs across new cloud footprint and existing data centers. They face long slow recovery times and data often needs to be converted to application-native formats.
The solution is data virtualization, which provides instant access to data that’s been sent to the cloud, already in an application-native format.
Data virtualization creates a new and more effective data management model architected down from applications, instead of up from the infrastructure. It helps to speed the path to the hybrid cloud while delivering backup/recovery and data on demand as a service.
These solutions enable an incremental-forever data capture model. That permits more frequent backups while shrinking backup windows and delivering lower RPOs. Data virtualization allows incremental changes to be merged into master copies, creating synthetic full copies for recoveries.