Actifio PAS: Protection and availability storage

Actifio PAS: Protection and availability storage

Last month I went to Hyderabad for the new product technical understanding and that product name is Actifio PAS and above I have already mentioned that what PAS stand for, as the training was wonderful and the technology too was very good.

I will be explaining about the Actifio technology and how it works and where this technology can be used and which section of market can be targeted.

Actifio—Who We Are

Actifio is radically simple copy data management.

Our Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) lets businesses recover anything instantly, for up to 90 percent less. PAS eliminates siloed data protection applications, virtualizing data management to deliver an application-centric, SLA-driven solution that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure. Actifio has helped liberate IT organizations and service providers of all sizes from vendor lock-in and the management challenges associated with exploding data growth. (definition taken from Actifio site).

So In above figure you can easily see that how we keep on copying the same production data again and again in different form for different purpose, and that’s why we keep on buying different Hardware to store those copies and because of that our IT budget keep on increasing on storing the same copy of data.

Now you all will be thinking that there is lot of technology which removes the duplicate data to be stored again in the compliance, ya that’s right like today there is lot of buzz of deduplication technology in market and it really helps you to not copy the duplicate data again.

Just have a small look in deduplication technology, how its coming in market, for ex: either the backup software will be having this deduplication features so that you can easily save your disk space by not copying the duplicate data again and again.so this may be licensed feature again extra cost if you want to use this feature.

Or you buy a dedicate Hardware deduplication compliance like EMC Datadomain and Quantum DXI boxes for dedicate deduplication backup solution, these hardware are disk based inline deduplication solution which will integrate with you existing backup software and takes backup on their disk. So if you see again a new hardware and extra cost for storing the copy of production data to the new hardware device.

Or now days this duplication features are present in the NAS storage also, but they are not inline deduplcation and they start the deduplication service on timely basis and find the duplicate data and keeps pointer on it.., but not much successful because utilize lots of CPU resource and then lots of manual work is required like I seen in Netapp deduplication volumes that you need to unduep the deduplication volume, if you want to increase its size. And if you see these production storage (SAN &NAS) are not meant for these types of work, they are meant for fetching the data to the user or servers or application in greatest performance, that’s why they are brought to centrally store the data and should give good performance on fetching the data.

And if we see in many IT environment these production storage are doing lots of extra work because of these extra features like deduplication, snapshot, cloning, migration,replication and etc.., and because of all those process the performance of production storage box decreases drastically and then the IT admin or IT manager complaints that their production storage is not giving the better performance.

Now Actifio PAS has removed all those production storage burden from (SAN &  NAS) and came up with the backup compliance which will be not only doing the deduplication but also it has a features of migration, cloning, mounting ,snapshot, backup, restore with defined default SLAs and if user want then he can define its own SLAs, to protect its data.

In below figure you will see how the Actifio PAS came up with the new approach.

 

“Actifio virtualizes your copy data storage applications, consolidating them to enable you to recover anything instantly for up to 90% less.”

Actifio—A New Approach 

Actifio virtualizes your copy data storage applications, providing backup, snapshot, BC/DR, test & dev, analytics and disaster recovery all through a single storage system. This approach enables you to consolidate all those functions and recover anything instantly; this is why Actifio is Radically Simple. (definition taken from the Actifo site.)

Now as it is clearly understandable if you see the image that how the Actifio stores the data from the production storage to its compliance and then how it virtualize the copy to the different environment, and save your lots of time in copying or moving the data from one place to other.

Actifio’s PAS is a copy data management system that can be deployed either within the SAN Fabric or “out-of-band,” over the network. Both methods have their advantages and provide customer options when deploying the Actifio solution. The heart of the Actifio solution is the Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology. Its function is to virtualize production data copy management, eliminating redundancies and re-purposing the unique data for multiple data management applications. VDP efficiently captures a single copy or “gold copy” of changed data from the server and reuses the data for multiple uses, allowing the applications to directly access to copy data from Actifio PAS without any data movement.

One of the good feature of Actifio is the discovery of the critical application on server and then its drive by just installing the Actifio connector , its an software which need to be installed on the server which need to be backedup, this software automatically discover the critical application and protect it by define SLA, and this connector comes free of cost and so if you see we no need to depend on the backup software to take the backup of the data, just install the connector and then you can easily backup its critical application as well the files on that server.

Even it easily discover the ESX servers and the vm which are hosted on that server, those vm can be viewed in a filesystem type view, in a proper structured way, so its easy to find out the which esx is hosting which vms and what all the application that vm have and the proper layout of its drive and files, so it becomes easy to take backup of single file in vm and easy to restore single file.

Several enterprise class applications and platforms provide advanced interfaces for better manageability of copy data. Examples include Microsoft Windows VSS and Oracle RMAN. Actifio PAS directly interfaces with these API’s to capture an application-consistent snapshot of the data and import only the changed blocks into Actifio PAS. This provides the most efficient level of data capture at the application level.

In addition to reducing the storage footprint by over 10X, Actifio PAS enables customers to use any storage device. Customers can now have their SLA’s dictate the type of storage they use, rather than be constrained by their storage vendor. Many users have re-purposed their existing storage for storing data copies or have opted for lower cost storage devices. This capability further lowers the overall storage costs by over 50%

Most of the production storage does not support the synchronous replication more than 100km, this 100 km of synchronous replication is supported by Hitachi HNAS solution it was mentioned on their white paper. But if you go through the white paper of Actifio it support the synchronous replication up to 300 km, which is unique.., and if you see known of the backup deduplication disk solution support the synchronous replication they all support the async replication and if you see Actifio which is your new generation backup device can sync your backup data upto 300km, so that you can achieve fastest recovery on the time of disaster.

Sync Replication: Synchronous replication can be guaranteed between customer sites   up to 300KM apart.

Now why I am telling about the replication of actifio is that to do synchronous replication in mostly required for the production storage, but for doing synchronous replication lots of cost comes into picture , buying the license and then doing the setup, and apart from that you will not get the distance of 300 km , so in Actifio the synchronous license is free you don’t have to pay additional cost and then you can easily do a synchronous setup of 300km .

Async Replication: Asyncronous replication has no distance limitation, and will send data over the WAN as fast as network bandwidth allows.

You no need to replace any of your device, like your SAN and NAS device it can easily integrate with your existing storage, now if I say integration means that you can easily give storage disk to Actifio PAS from your existing storage and that means if you have multiple vendor storage you can assign LUN from those storage via Actifio, and can easily give those luns to different servers.

The below given figure tells you about the product packages.

 

Where this solution can be fit in IT environment.

Now after all the solution discussion comes the management, as some time managing the good solution becomes very complex , but the Actifio desktop is the GUI interface by which you can manage the actifio compliance and define your SLA and do the replication and restore easily the backedup data and easily take backup of the critical data.., I will be showing of the “Actifio desktop view “ via some snap by which you can easily figure out that how the Actifio desktop looks and how easily you can manage the actifio compliance.

How to create a SLA

 

 

In the above figure you have seen that how easy it is to define your own SLA and then how easy to protect particular application on that define SLA and then how easy it is to restore the file and data, and how fast you can restore by not copying or moving the data back to the client or server but via mounting the data back to the server, or you can create a clone copy of the data and use it for your testing purpose.

The below given is the snap view of the management window in Actifio desktop which shows you that what all application are protected and what all are unprotected, you can see the system health the space view and the jobs history and hardware health and many more..

 

Now as I have already wrote enough about the Actifio which can easily help you out to understand about this product, if still you want to know more than you can visit to Actifio site www.actifio.com and can get more information about this product, or you can write to me on my email id.

I want to tell you that this product was tested by the ESG lab and they have given a good report about this product, you can download that report from the ESG site or from the actifio site and can have a proper and deep understanding of how good this product is and how easily it can save lots of your IT money, and how it can reduce you backup window and restore window.

Below is the conclusive report which the ESG lab has given about the Actifio.

The Bigger Truth 

Everyone is talking about the data explosion occurring in organizations around the globe. More data —and bigger data sets —are being created to drive business. What few realize, however, is that while production data is certainly growing, copies   of production data are growing exponentially. Copies are made for physical backup, virtual backup, snapshots, disaster recovery, business continuity, business analytics, compliance, and test/development. The cost of managing and retaining these copies is often many times higher than the cost to store the original data. In particular, storing and managing all of the copies using separate tools and duplicate infrastructures is a tremendous expense, and it consumes much of the database, application, server, and storage administrators’ time.

Actifio PAS separates what you do with your data copies from how you store them. Why should copies have to be created differently and managed separately just because they have different purposes, copy frequencies, retention times, and recovery needs?

Actifio PAS virtualizes the management of   all copies so they work for the customer instead of the other way around. Users make a single copy and use it for different purposes with different SLAs —dramatically reducing unnecessary data growth, reclaiming tire 1 storage space, and getting instant ba ckup and recovery. Along the way, they can get rid of backup software, point solutions, dedupe appliances, tape libraries, tapes, replication tools, and WAN optimization products. Offloading copying and copy management makes a production environment more efficient. Customers gain freedom of choice because any production storage can be attached to Actifio PAS appliances   to be used as the data protection store. In addition, that freedom makes offsite replication more affordable and ensures that future storage   decisions aren’t dictated by today’s needs.

Through validation testing, ESG Lab was able to confirm a 29 times (2900%) capacity reduction compared with the traditional copy management approach.  By leveraging deduplicated replication, we also observed a 97% reduction in the bandwidth required for replication.  ESG Lab expects real-world savings to be even greater than the testing results were, as field experience   has shown typical data to exhibit even better deduplication rates than the   test data   set. 

Actifio PAS represents a new class of storage designed to simplify and streamline the IT infrastructure, and the benefits are dramatic. Most organizations make between three and 20 copies of production data.  Some may have over one hundred copies.  That’s great news for storage vendors, but it is a huge capital and operational expense   for IT organizations.

Actifio PAS is an application-centric, SLA -driven solution that, through virtualization, decouples the management of data from storage, network, and server infrastructures. The efficiency improvements and cost reduction s will benefit not only corporate IT organizations, but also service providers that can leverage these features to differentiate their offerings, prices, and margins.  Although   Actifio PAS is new to the market, ESG expects it to significantly affect the bottom line of any corporate IT department or service provider, as well as enable   new   levels of protection for “big data” sets. We look forward to following Actifio PAS as it expands in its scope and capabilities.

 

If you all enjoyed my blog on Actifio or on any other which I wrote please do comment on it, your comment keep me motivated on writing lot more and sharing all my knowledge with you all. Do write suggestions if you all have any.