In this Q&A session, Chandra Reddy of Actifio shares Sanjay of Hughes Networks perspective and expertise in the area of multi-cloud disaster recovery. Application Development Performance: How Organizations Make Good to Great Digital Transformation. Sign-up now. Sanjay: We evaluated and picked Actifio as it satisfied all the critical capabilities I listed above. How Actifio GO Helps: Deep integration with SQL Server and SAP HANA databases ensures application consistent data capture and recovery inside of Google Cloud. It is built on a globally distributed object storage system and can be accessed through the Actifio Desktop, Actifio Global Manager and via a vSphere Web Client plug-in. AGM has a simple interface and can be used for end-to-end data protection, cloud mobility and test data management. We decide not to go down this path. For its current DR strategy, Acme conducts block-level data replication for all the data and resources in its on-prem data centers.
You still need to invest in another backup and DR tool to protect all those apps and web servers. For a real DR, have the flexibility to instant mount and recover from object storage to spin up VMs and DBs in the cloud, and in the background, have a storage v-motion like feature to get the data back to block storage, with no app downtime. Actifio currently has approximately 400 employees, and international offices in Australia, China, Germany, India, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom. Functions of VDP include managing the data lifecycle, enabling data use, capturing and virtualizing data at the block level, as well as data deduplication, compression and replication. The mounts are very fast as the data is not copied. Actifio provides a light-weight connector that is required to be deployed on Google Cloud VMs.
Flexibility to store backups in multiple clouds and no lock-in to a single cloud vendor. Established data protection vendors and smaller companies followed Actifio into CDM and data virtualization. NAS Director also uses incremental forever backup. Instead Actifio presents a virtual disk with all the data in it via iSCSI or NFS.
Depending on the performance requirements, enterprises can specify the right storage tier to use with Actifio. Its also available in some of the public cloud marketplaces.
This ensures that after instant mount and provisioning a database clone, there is no performance overhead because of format conversion. Ideally, I would like an RPO of a minute for all apps. We configure Zerto to replicate data from GCVE-primary to GCVE-dr via the peered network connection through acme-transit-vpc. Then, Zerto restores the replicated VMs, data and applications into the Workload Subnets. Google Cloud VMware Engine also works for mainframe applications. Both IBM DB2 and z/VM DB2 are migrated into Compute Engine-based Linux/Unix/Windows, LUW DB2, IBM Global Mirror is not applicable in the Google Cloud environment anymore, EMC RecoverPoint is not available in the GCP environment, Isilon, now called PowerScale, is now available as a SaaS solution in the Google Cloud environment, Two-hour RPO requirement for production systems, Support for the current bubble network design and implementation, to avoid a major system and application rewrite, The ability to orchestrate the disk remount for thousands of VMs, each of which may have up to 24 disks mounted.
And lastly, we wanted to keep license and infrastructure costs low by considering one platform that could take care of backup and low RTO DR needs in hybrid cloud. Fifty percent to 70% of Actifio's sales each quarter are to members of its existing customer base. From the diagram, you can see the details of Acmes setup: By migrating to Google Cloud, the following changes apply to Acmes system and applications: In addition, when it moved to Google Cloud, Acme adopted Apigee to orchestrate its web services, and that environment also needs to be protected. Apigee, the Google-provided managed service. Catalogic ECX can be deployed within a Docker container or as a virtual appliance. Alternatively, please reach out to uswed be happy to explore your particular use case with you! Taken together, there are three major requirements that will determine the DR solution that we design for Acmes systems running in Google Cloud: Based on our teams experience implementing this DR architecture for a real-world customer, we created this example DR solution for Acme. Actifio GO solution consists of the following components: Actifio Global Manager (AGM): The management control plane that is automatically deployed in Google Cloud. Actifio also partners with Digital Immunity, a company that specializes in endpoint protection against ransomware. Actifio is now part of Google Cloud. To support Acmes bubble network and keep the same IP addresses in the DR region, we need the same set of Acme VPC and network settings in Acmes Google Cloud DR region. Powerful SLA engine ensures consistent protection policies across on-premises and one or more Google Cloud regions. For Acme, this is unworkable: With its 3,000 servers, it will take great effort to make sure that each disk is restored from its snapshots and then mounted to the restored VM in the right order. For DR tests, reduce RTO with the ability to instant mount and recover straight from the object storage and, at the same time, reduce TCO with no 247 block storage costs. 2022 Actifio Inc. Flashback. Yes, Actifio leverages native Block Change Tracking (BCT) technology to capture just the changed blocks in its incremental forever data ingestion. We didnt have to choose between low RTO vs. low TCO.
AGM is also used to administer, monitor, and manage one or more Actifio Sky data movers. CDS uses application-centric, service-level agreement-based data management, and can be deployed in a single site or multiple sites.
They can perform instant mounts of native cloud snapshots but it takes too much time to hydrate data from snapshots to persistent disk thus increasing RTO. Sanjay: While native database replication can deliver low RTO, it has the following consequences: How will you recover the rest of the application and web servers that work with the database? The bubble network prevents us from deploying Actifio Sky into acme-transit-vpc and acme-transit-DR-vpc because AGM will peer with two VPCs with the IP ranges. But that is impractical as it increases the infrastructure, software, and operations costs at a logarithmic scale. But they can not do instant mount and recovery from object storage and have to restore data from object storage to block storage in the cloud, thus increasing RTO. Yes.
Actifio is now part of Google Cloud. Innovate with Data in the Next Normal: Leveraging Cloud Data Management Platforms for Data Protection, Availability, and Reuse, 10 Qualities of an Exceptional Enterprise DBA. Funding efforts have pushed Actifio closer to a potential initial public offering, but CEO Ashutosh has said that the more pressing goal is assisting current customers and gaining new ones. Users can use simple google like search interface in Actifio Global Manager UI and perform granular file/folder restores. No agents need to be deployed in the Guest OS.
Sanjay: View from the business side is Business Continuity; Business needs to be up and running with the least amount of downtime or impact. IBM Global Mirror conducts block-level data replication for DR for the IBM mainframe stack, including the mainframe middle tier, the DB2 database (configuration table) and z/VM DB2 database (core server). Clients of Actifio have included Boston University Medical Campus, Time Warner Cable, the City of South Portland, Unilever, Netflix and IBM. To meet Acmes demanding RTO/RPO requirements for its most demanding applications, we explore coupling it with Zerto, a scalable replication platform that virtually eliminates data loss and downtime to ensure continuous availability.
In August 2018, Actifio completed its second $100 million dollar funding round in four years, increasing its valuation to $1.3 billion. Among the first vendors to develop backup software for VMs, Veeam provides backup, restore and replication functions similar to those of Actifio. Built for data protection and DR, Actifio Sky features include snapshots, backup, deduplication, compression, replication and vaulting. Users use AGM to setup backup SLAs, recover files/folders/VMs, DR in Google Cloud. This way, we can cherry-pick and leverage the best capabilities of each cloud vendor to complement the on-prem datacenter. Thus, it was important for us to consider an architecture that reduces 247 compute and storage consumption in the cloud to a minimum. Ashutosh joined HP Storage after it acquired his previous company, storage resource management startup AppIQ in 2005. For example: If an enterprise wants to use Actifio to provision 20 clones of a 10 TB database, the enterprise would need Actifio license for 10 TB of source data. Thus its essential to tier RPO for various applications. Under normal circumstances, both Google Cloud VMware Engine VPCs are peered with the acme-transit-vpc VPC. As shown in the diagram below, with a multi-region Apigee license in place, network traffic can be automatically routed to the disaster recovery region. Actifio Sky Data Mover establishes a secure connection with the connector to trigger application consistent incremental forever backups and instant recovery.
Also, the route to the Workload Subnets in the GCVE-dr region is turned on.
Read on for Colocation, data-center-as-a-service offerings and cloud-like consumption models offer customers alternatives -- or adjuncts -- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella encouraged partners to push beyond digital transformation, while the company's channel executives All Rights Reserved, Option to consume the platform as a product or as a SaaS offering. Actifio Resiliency Director reduces restore time for virtual machines (VMs) and provides 1-Click DR Orchestration to eliminate manual DR tasks with no effect on production.
