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Ditch tape and fly into the public cloud with us, beams bullish Actifio
Deduping backup boxen are 'rarely usable'? Whatever
Comment Actifio can store its virtualised copy data in the public cloud, calling its facility OnVault and saying it replaces tape and dedplicated disk data graveyards.
Its press release thunders away, saying that the term "vault" comes from the practice of locking away tape media literally in a physical vault for compliance requirements, expecting never to be used again.
More recently, “expensive deduplication disk devices were used to store data for the long term. Both these practices result in a graveyard of data that is complex to manage, rarely useable, and locked into vendor's proprietary formats, and have become significantly costly to doing business.”
Rarely usable? Shall we mention LTFS for tape, Commvault software, Quantum StorNext, HGST's Active Archive and many, many other examples of accessible and accessed long-term retention data storage? Marketing BS, hey?
Effectively, Actifio is saying use our virtualised copy data store in the public cloud to replace on-premises, off-line tape and D2D backup stores for the stuff you need to keep long-term because you might eventually need it.
It claims that using its Virtual Data Pipeline v7.0 to pump Actifio copy data out to AWS S3, Google Cloud Nearline or IBM Cloud Object Storage gives you native format storage, instant access and lower cost. It's still a data graveyard, only it's easier to disinter the data bodies.
You can't use Microsoft's Azure cloud but perhaps that will be added to Actifio's supported cloud data cemetery list in the future.
With OnVault an application is assigned a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which defines retention and the choice of one or more platforms for the long-term storage. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest. There is an OnVault utility available to authorised users to access their OnVault data without an Actifio appliance, with this meaning there is no Actifio lock-in to the stored data.
Overall Actifio claims: "Businesses now have a single data management solution to handle the entire lifecycle of data generated by business applications, social media, machine logs, Internet of Things (IoT), among other sources; from creation, protection, analysis, and compliance to eventual deletion, both on-premises or in the Cloud."
In effect the on-premises Actifio appliance system gets a transparent public cloud back-end and Actifio gets to say it offers a more complete secondary data store. Competitor Rubrik has added cloud facilities. Primary Data also supports cloud storage. No doubt it will become a standard feature of all data silo convergers. ®