Dealing With The Copy Data Explosion

For many years now, IT storage professionals have had to cope with the seemingly unfettered growth of data across the business environment. The lion’s share of data growth by far, however, is not caused by ordinary, day-to-day business activity, but rather in the way data is copied, moved and shared across the enterprise.

In fact, the ratio of copies of data to the actual primary copy of data itself is roughly 20-1. Examples of copy data include file system snapshot copies, clones of databases to support test and development work, copies of production data to feed business analytic systems, copies produced to support daily backup and data replication routines, etc. In short, all of the redundancy of copy data is responsible for better than 90% of overall data growth.

Deduping the Enterprise

Actifio came to market in 2009 with a Copy Data Storage platform that was specifically designed to eliminate copy data redundancy and enable storage managers to streamline their storage infrastructure in much the same manner that server virtualization helped reduce redundant islands of server computational resources. Fast forward to the present day and one can see that Actifio’s technology is gaining significant traction in the market with medium to large enterprises and service providers – as evidenced by 2012‘s 700% year over year growth and 280 production systems deployed in the field.

The concept behind Actifio’s approach to copy data management is simple yet elegant –

maintain one copy of data, sometimes referred to as the “gold copy”, efficiently protect it and make it available instantly to any data management application across the enterprise.

At the heart of the operation is Actifio’s purpose built storage appliance and patented distributed, deduplicated object file system, called Virtual Data Pipeline. Actifio, in effect, virtualizes data access so applications can gain access to the gold copy on demand. The Copy Data Storage system then leverages snapshots in tandem with change block tracking, to efficiently capture and protect changes to the data.

Users can then mount the current version of production data or a previous point-in-time copy to do their work. What’s more, since data is continuously being protected, there is no need to carve out a separate dedicated backup window. Actifio can also replicate data to satisfy offsite DR and business resiliency requirements, using traditional synchronous, asynchronous, or their own patented Dedupe Async replication. In this manner, enterprises can satisfy the data access demands of all users while significantly reducing IT operational overhead.

What’s more, there may be opportunities to eliminate many of the hardware devices and software licenses typically required for traditional storage and backup infrastructure. Likewise, maintenance expenditures can be reduced in addition to potentially lower power and cooling costs and fewer occupied data center rack space units.

Actifio 5.1

Actifio recently announced version 5.1 of their Copy Data Storage management software. In addition to building in an installation wizard to dramatically simplify, speed up and streamline the installation process, version 5.1 is bundled with enhanced business resiliency and data governance features.

Business continuity planners and managed service providers are continually seeking ways to build automation into their recovery strategies so that DR service level agreements (SLAs) are consistently being met. Version 5.1 adds server bare metal restore features, test failover to enable on demand, non-disruptive DR testing, integration with LDAP and active directory and failback/synchback capabilities to help ensure normal business operations following a disaster.

Furthermore, Actifio 5.1 provides advanced reporting tools which can be utilized by compliance officers or any authorized user or group to validate data integrity and verify that long-term data retention policies are being observed and adhering to regulatory standards.

In short, the added features built-in to version 5.1 allow Actifio end users to more proactively monitor critical production and DR assets by promoting advanced reporting and frequent DR verification testing to further solidify business confidence in DR contingency planning.

Storage Swiss Take

Enterprise IT environments and large multi-tenant environments, like those found in cloud service provider infrastructures, require more streamlined and efficient data management capabilities to meet the persistent demands for increased storage capacity while keeping costs in check. Intelligent data storage management frameworks, like those offered by Actifio, represent the next logical phase of data storage reduction that have become so prevalent in deduplicated backup environments. While the efficiencies gained by reducing backup capacity requirements through dedupe technology have been impressive, the opportunities for achieving even larger efficiency gains through copy data storage platforms could be monumental.

Actifio is not a client of Storage Switzerland

About Colm Keegan

As a 22 year IT veteran, Colm has worked in a variety of capacities ranging from technical support of critical OLTP environments to consultative sales and marketing for system integrators and manufacturers. His focus in the enterprise storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions space extends from mainframe and distributed computing environments across a wide range of industries.