Actifio Unveils Series of Platform Enhancements for VMware’s Cloud Suite 

Actifio, the copy data virtualization company, announced a series of significant platform enhancements for businesses leveraging VMware’s cloud suite. These enhancements extend the power of virtualization from compute and networks to storage, delivering an application-centric data management model that breaks the bonds of legacy infrastructure.

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 andinteroperability, 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.

“Each and every day I interact with customers whose ability to realize the promise of tomorrow’s ‘software-defined data center’ is limited by application data still bound to infrastructure in yesterday’s data center,” 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 center of customers’ vision for the Software-Defined Data Center, and we’re putting it there.”

Management and Interoperability Extends Productivity and Efficiency Gains

Organizations can now easily manage all levels of their Software-Defined Data Center through Actifio’s advanced integration with VMware through vCenter APIs, VMware APIs for Data Protection, VMware Virtual Volumes (VVol), Change Block Tracking, and now VMware vSAN.

New vCenter plugin – For those VMware Administrators that prefer to manage their infrastructure through VMware vCenter, 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 datacenter 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, vCenter and vSANs will continue to help our organization ‘do more with less.’”

Cloud Mobility Enables Efficient Data Services for Software Defined Data Center

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 centers with disparate infrastructures. Actifio’s WAN-optimized replication protocol eliminates barriers to data mobility from the data center to and from the cloud, enabling transformational data management velocity and scale.

"Enterprises today face massive challenges to effectively store, share, protect, and analyze 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 vCenter 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.