“Actifio has enabled us to pivot from traditional tape backups, reduce our overall backup licensing costs, and expand our disaster preparedness by integrating the cloud as a backup target.”
ARTHUR BRANDT – DIRECTOR OF ENTERPRISE INFRASTRUCTURE
ACTIFIO DATA-DRIVEN SOLUTION
Visionary Enterprise-Class Backup and Recovery.
OVERVIEW
Modernize your backup. Improve your RTO, RPO, & retention SLAs, on-premises, in private, public, or hybrid clouds, all while reducing cost, risk, and complexity.
Actifio provides application consistent backup incrementally, forever. We support a wide variety of enterprise applications and databases, whether running in virtual machines, public cloud, or in physical servers. Actifio protects and enables instant recovery.
Actifio software helps enterprises with rapid, scalable backup and instant data recovery, anywhere in the public cloud and on-premises – reducing risk, improving RPO/RTO, and providing peace of mind.
CHALLENGES
Enterprises using legacy backup architecture commonly face multiple challenges that increase exponentially as data grows.
Legacy backup products require recurring full backups at least weekly, if not daily. Recurring full backups impact performance and the backup window.
A large backup window also leads to a large Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
Recovering from database dumps or proprietary backup format increases Recovery Time Objective (RTO) as well.
And lastly, storing backups for multiple years in expensive deduplication appliances increases the total cost of ownership (TCO).
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HOW Actifio HELPS
Actifio reduces backup windows and associated performance impacts by up to 20x by delivering an application consistent incremental forever backup solution.
The smaller backup window also reduces RPO, and RTO shrinksfrom days to minutes with a unique capability to recover multi-TB datasets instantly.
Actifio’s ability to store backups in native format on any storage enables production-like performance post recovery.
For long term-data retention, Actifio can leverage inexpensive cloud object storage to lower costs while still offering instant recovery.
Best-of-all, with Actifio, enterprises can leverage any private/public cloud.
Customers rely on our proven solutions and deep experience
Additional Resources
Solution overview
Actifio for Oracle Backup and Recovery
Solution overview
Actifio for SQL Server Backup and Recovery
Media
Chandra Reddy, VP of Product Marketing, discusses how Actifio works.
Frequently Asked Questions.
Actifio VDP is the patented core Virtual Data Pipeline technology that can be consumed in multiple form factors.
Actifio Sky is a VM appliance that runs Actifio VDP engine and can be provisioned in a public cloud VM or on-premises in VMware, Hyper-V VMs.
Actifio CDS/CDX is a physical appliance cluster that runs Actifio VDP engine with High Availability and is typically used on-premises.
Actifio supports all major public cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Oracle. It’s also available in leading public cloud marketplaces.
Actifio supports all major databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP HANA, as well as NoSQL, MongoDB, and others.
For hypervisors, Actifio supports VMware and Hyper-V. For OSes, Actifio supports Microsoft Windows, Linux (RHEL, SLES), and Unix (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris). Please refer to the Actifio support matrix for more details.
Actifio’s pricing model is very simple and easy to understand. It’s based on the amount of source data protected. For example: If an enterprise wants to use Actifio to protect 5 database instances, each with 10 TB source database size, the enterprise would need Actifio license for 50 TB of source data. Enterprises can use this license anywhere in the public cloud or on-premises.
Following are the key comparisons:
- Full vs Incremental forever backup for databases: Legacy vendors perform recurring full backups while Actifio performs app consistent incremental forever backups using native APIs.
- Large vs Instant recovery time: RTO with legacy vendors is large because of restoring from their proprietary backup format. Compare this with Actifio’s instant recovery where it can recover even a 100 TB database in just minutes.
- Lack of automated test data management for DevOps: Legacy vendors don’t have a self-service, storage-efficient, automated test data management to create database clones. Compare this with Actifio which reuses its backups to provision database clones in just minutes with self-service and automation.
Following are the key comparisons:
- Low vs High Performance post instant recovery: While mounting backups from deduplication appliances might be instant, the deduplication format on commodity storage impacts the IO performance significantly. Users just can’t run mission-critical databases from such appliances. Compare this with Actifio which stores backups in its native format on any storage tier, thus delivering the raw native performance of the underlying storage.
- None vs High flexibility for storage and storage protocols: With deduplication appliance vendors users are locked into whatever storage the vendor’s supply and typically the only interface supported is NFS. Compare this with Actifio which allows users to specify any storage vendor with the right performance metrics, thus eliminating storage vendor lock-in. Moreover, users have complete flexibility to backup, recover, and mount over Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS protocols.
- Lack of automated test data management for DevOps: Deduplication appliance vendors don’t offer a self-service, storage-efficient, automated test data management. Compare this with Actifio which reuses backups to provision database clones in just minutes with self-service and automation.
- High vs Low Cloud TCO: The scaleout deduplication appliance vendors support very few public cloud providers. They also need a very large amount of compute to protect cloud resident workloads with a minimum of 3-4 node clusters, thus driving up the cloud costs. Compare that with Actifio which needs very small compute to protect workloads, leverages cloud block and/or object storage and even delivers instant recovery from cloud object storage.
Yes. Actifio leverages native Block Change Tracking (BCT) technology to capture just the changed blocks in its incremental forever backups. After the first backup, which is a full backup, Actifio does an incremental backup and incremental merge for the rest of time.
Learn more about how Actifio works.
Yes. The backup admin or DBA can setup SLAs in such a way that archive/transaction logs can be backed up every X minutes or hours in between the incremental backups. For example, a user can set up incremental backups every 4 hours and log backups every 15 minutes.
During recoveries, a user can specify any point-in-time. Actifio automatically identifies the nearest incremental point-in-time, mounts a synthetic virtual full copy instantly as of that point-in-time, and applies the archive/transaction logs to recover the data to the specified point-in-time. All of this is fully automated.
Actifio stores the backups in native format. This ensures that, after instant mount and recovery, there is no performance overhead because of format conversion.
The other factor to consider is the storage on which the backups are stored by Actifio.
Depending on the performance requirements after instant recovery or provisioning database clones to test/dev users, enterprises can specify the right storage tier to use with Actifio.
And lastly, Actifio also offers the flexibility to instantly mount and recover over fiber channel or iSCSI or NFS depending upon the user preference.
Thus the performance can be as good as the underlying storage and the protocol the user wants to use.