Extending the power of virtualisation to enterprise data management

By virtualizing the management and retention of data, Actifio allows businesses to eliminate multiple data silos and point tools deployed for backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, compliance, analytics, and test and development, and instead rely on one, SLA-driven, virtualized solution. The new capabilities extend the deep integration between VMware and Actifio’s data virtualization platforms for superior management and interoperability, increased resiliency, and cloud mobility, including:
· Easy Cloud Management – Management extensions for VMware vSphere and vCloud with a plug-in for the vSphere Web Client.

· Fast Storage Deployment — Advanced Actifio Sky integration with VMware vSAN technology.
· Rapid Application Recovery — Actifio ReadyVM technology integration with VMware.
· Deep Storage Intelligence — Actifio CDS and Sky support for VMware virtual volume (VVol) technology beta program.
· Application Recovery Assurance — General Availability of Actifio Resiliency Director, the world’s fastest recovery automation of virtual machines in the cloud.
· Cloud Mobility — Easily move applications between locations with heterogeneous storage environments or move, vault, or retire applications between clouds with Actifio’s patented dedupe-async technology.

As organizations progress through VMware’s journey from basic virtualization and into cloud services, they will quickly find significant value in the greater levels of business agility, automation, and responsiveness. Similarly, Actifio’s Copy Data Virtualization platform extends this value by eliminating redundant silos of infrastructure and data management applications, ultimately freeing data from underlying physical infrastructure.

“We leverage new innovative platforms to deliver the necessary competitive and innovation edge for our clients across industries, through a combination of speed, agility and imagination,” said Apoorva Singh, SVP and Global Head IMS & Digital Practice at iGATE. “Actifio’s data virtualization platform, and our full suite of VMware solutions serve as two of these core platforms helping our clients save millions of dollars, while gaining back thousands of hours for high-impact activities, such as faster application development and testing. We’re excited to see Actifio’s copy data virtualization platform continue to be tightly integrated with VMware continuing to extend the value we can provide for our clients.”

Management and Interoperability Extends Productivity and Efficiency Gains
Organizations can now easily manage all levels of their Software-Defined Data Centre through Actifio’s advanced integration with VMware through vCentre APIs, VMware APIs for Data Protection, VMware Virtual Volumes (VVol), Change Block Tracking, and now VMware vSAN.

New vCentre plugin – For those VMware Administrators that prefer to manage their infrastructure through VMware vCentre, vSphere Web Client, or the vCloud Suite, Actifio provides a plugin that enables management of virtualized copy data from VMware’s management platforms.

New vSAN Support for Actifio Sky – VMware Virtual SAN is the software-defined storage solution for the VMware datacentre enabling storage and compute to run in the same physical host. Actifio certified Actifio Sky integration for VMware vSANs eliminates the need for external storage for copy data.

New VVol Support (Beta) – Actifio delivers advanced VM-centric storage awareness for copy services including snapshots/clone offload for production VMware environments for superior performance and scale. Experimental Actifio VVol integration will also provide SLA awareness directly into the VM-layer enabling built-in data protection, rapid VM migration, and efficient application development with Actifio LiveClone functionality.

“There is nothing more important than ensuring all of our solutions are tightly integrated, otherwise we risk undoing all of the operational efficiencies gained through server virtualization in the first place,” said Said Ernesto DiGiambattista, Chief Technology & Security Officer at Sentinel Benefits & Financial Group “With Actifio and VMware, the opposite is true. We have continually reduced the many tools required to support our mission critical SLAs while expanding the number of virtualized applications and use-cases. The new management integrations between Actifio, vCentre and vSANs will continue to help our organization ‘do more with less.’ ”

Cloud Mobility Enables Efficient Data Services for Software Defined Data Centre
New Cloud Vaulting - Actifio Sky Cloud Vault delivers SLA-driven cloud data vaulting for select vCloud Service Providers or Amazon Web Services (AWS), acting as a replication target from data centres with disparate infrastructures. Actifio’s WAN-optimized replication protocol eliminates barriers to data mobility from the data centre to and from the cloud, enabling transformational data management velocity and scale.

"Enterprises today face massive challenges to effectively store, share, protect, and analyse their data due to factors such as explosive data growth, shrinking backup windows, server virtualization, and the emergence of cloud and mobile applications," said David Simpson, Sr. Analyst at 451 Research "We see Actifio's application-centric approach to data virtualization as a key strategy IT can use to meet their SLA's more effectively. Actifio’s newly-launched, VM-centric solutions will allow organizations to spend less on expensive IT infrastructure that slows them down, and more on software platforms like VMware that speeds them up."

Increased Resiliency through Advanced Orchestration Supports Maximum Application Uptime
Actifio brings a single VMware-based solution for backup, recovery, disaster recovery, business continuity, and application development and testing.
New ReadyVM Technology – Actifio ReadyVM enables instant mount and recovery of failed VMs locally or in a remote location - in a ready state. Disaster recovery tests can be run on-demand using ReadyVM, which are also tightly integrated with VMware vCentre Site Recovery Manager to maintain management consistency.
New Actifio Resiliency Director (GA) – Actifio Resiliency Director orchestrates the recovery of compute, network, and data at an enterprise disaster recovery site or a cloud service provider and validates the results to provide a complete solution for non-disruptive, automated recovery and test. It delivers complete resiliency in the cloud and enables enterprises to restore critical business functionality faster and cheaper than previously possible.

“Since announcing Sungard Availability Services’ Recover2Cloud services – which leverage the power of Actifio’s copy data virtualization platform and Actifio Resiliency Director – we’ve experienced great excitement and traction among our early-access customer base,” said Souvik Choudhury, Vice President of Product Management, and Recovery Services at Sungard AS. “We’re excited to build on this positive momentum and fulfil the growing demand for cloud-based application recovery."

“Each and every day I interact with customers whose ability to realize the promise of tomorrow’s ‘software-defined data centre’ is limited by application data still bound to infrastructure in yesterday’s data centre,” said Ash Ashutosh, Founder & CEO of Actifio. “Together with VMware and our strategic partners, Actifio is using data virtualization to enable access to enterprise data whenever and wherever it’s needed. Today we’re introducing our broadest set of integrations ever for improved resiliency, agility, and cloud mobility. We think ‘data’ should be at the centre of customers’ vision for the Software-Defined Data Centre, and we’re putting it there.”

Actifio now counts over 500 enterprise users across customers in 36 counties, managing more than one Exabyte of essential enterprise production data – and majority who use Actifio as a key element within their Software-Defined Data Centre strategy. Dozens of Cloud Service Provider partners now have Actifio-powered copy data virtualization offerings in development or in market, delivering public and hybrid cloud copy data management services to enterprise customers around the world.