Thursday, December 19, 2019

A new product iteration for Actifio

Actifio, pioneer of the Copy Data Management (CDM) wave, jumped into the cloud with a clear strategy and the support of 6 key cloud providers: AWS, GCP, Azure, IBM, Oracle, Alibaba in addition to on-premises and VMware.

The company articulates its offering with 3 products iterations: Sky, CDX and GO supporting a wide list of environments from mainframes to Kubernetes.

In 10 years, Actifio secures 3600 customers in 38 countries for an average price of $200k. Projection gives an interesting growth and we wonder why the company is not traded yet on public market. Actifio is listed as Unicorn for several years and continues to belong to that group as mentioned by the last Coldago Storage Unicorn Note.

In term of business, the company sells direct to global accounts and leverages channels, oem and SI even MSP partners to large commercial accounts and SME. IBM, Dell EMC and Lenovo are oem and we're surprised to see here Dell EMC with their rich DP offering.

In term of architecture and product design, the 1st key point is that the philosophy is agent based to have fine grain control. The mode developed by Actifio guarantees application data consistency running on physical, VM, container and cloud. It means that Actifio engine orchestrates and relies on storage devices, applications or vSphere to list a few.


For databases, Oracle, MS SQL Server or SAP Hana, Actifio requires a connector to be install on DB server and operates as a client of Actifio Sky respectively to manipulate RMAN, VSS API and Hana snapshot API. It's the same deployment model for VM or physical server with a connecter deployed for each VM to protect. In more general term, connectors deployed on hosts discover and capture data, quiesce applications, enable CBT for incremental for ever capture and manage the transaction logs.

The goal of 10c, last major release of Actifio, is centered on cloud, containers and copy data. It is designed to leverage the cloud as the default and preferred IT environment and targets 8 use cases and advantages:
  1. One click multi-cloud DR orchestration for AWS and GCP
  2. Multi-Cloud Scale-Out recoveries
  3. Breaking object storage price/performance barrier leveraging compatible S3 object storage
  4. Rapid cloning of databases to containers thanks to Kubernetes managed containers
  5. Mount and migrate
  6. Agentless multi-cloud VM snapshot management
  7. Automated data management for databases
  8. Direct-to-Cloud VMware protection
Actifio 10c will be available in Q1 2020, Sky, CDX and GO will leverage 10c new features and multi-cloud enhancements. 2020 will be interesting in data protection...
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