Actifio 10c Improves Cloud Copy Data Management

Actifio has introduced a new version of its software platform that aims to improve hybrid and multicloud copy data management. The new version, Actifio 10c, features eight new features.

"Actifio follows a different model than the traditional data protection solution," said George Crump, president of Storage Switzerland. "First, it stores data in native application format, making it accessible near-instantly to almost any process or service. Second, it gives organizations the option as to how much they want to invest in on-premises infrastructure … and can instantly mount a VM’s datastore directly from on-premises or cloud object storage. That data is then streamed, from either location, back to the production storage. The VM is immediately accessible as Actifio restores data in the background."

Crump said the new version of the copy data management software is a significant upgrade. Not only does it allow organizations to recover rapidly anywhere, but it helps users keep costs down by adding performance to object storage in ways that allow it to serve many use cases. With this release, organizations can use Actifio 10c not only to migrate workloads to the cloud, but to protect them once they are there, he added.

The new version includes one-click multicloud disaster recovery (DR) orchestration. According to the company, this new feature allows users to recover thousands of on-premises virtual machines (VMs), physical servers and cloud VMs with one-click DR orchestration in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The DR orchestration capabilities allow users to create and automatically execute disaster recovery plans, Crump said. With these capabilities, users can preset the network by setting the order of recovery. They also can execute pre- and post-recovery scripts. The result, he said, is one-click recoveries either on-premises or in the cloud.

Organizations can also use DR orchestration for cloud migrations. "The capability can continuously seed a sandbox during testing and then perform the final cutover when ready. It can also inject these workloads into containers instead of VMs to further help organizations modernize their data center operations," Crump said.

Another new feature of the copy data management software is the ability to perform multicloud scale-out recoveries. According to the company, this can reduce recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery cost with intelligent and elastic load balancing from object storage across multiple Actifio instances.

Actifio also has added a reverse change block tracking capability so that it restores only the data required for recovery. "This streaming capability eliminates the 'return home' problem, and the reverse change block tracking significantly lowers recovery time and cloud egress costs," Crump explained.

Other new features include rapid cloning of databases to containers, agentless multicloud VM snapshot management, automated data management for databases and direct-to-cloud VMware protection.

Actifio 10c will be generally available in the first quarter of 2020.