Actifio released PAS 5.0 this week in a bid to attract cloud services providers and large enterprises. How? With the promise of instant data recoverability with lessened storage requirements, desirable traits as businesses place more data on cloud-enabled storage infrastructures.
PAS, which stands for Protection and Availability Storage, has undergone several improvements since it debuted in October 2011, according to Andrew Gilman, senior director of Global Marketing for Actifio.
Foremost are enhancements to the data protection platform that allow its systems to optimize data storage capacity and transfer speeds, including a 200 percent increase in deduplication capacity, 10GbE support and a 2x increase in data throughput, according to Actifio. New Enterprise Manage software aids in large PAS deployments.
Taken altogether, the company claims the features can reduce the storage management costs of application data protection by up to 90 percent. Since Actifio’s platform effectively acts as “a secondary storage array that lets you mount the application,” says Gilman, PAS can “instantly recreate that data on demand.”
Between the fast restores and a consumer grade UI that simplifies and automates management tasks, “it’s like Time Machine for the enterprise,” commented Gilman.
The time- and storage space-saving efficiencies stem from Actifio’s approach to storage virtualization. Whereas businesses typically store up to 120 copies of production data with an array of backup and storage management tools to keep them in check, PAS winnows everything down to a more manageable size, said CEO Ash Ashutosh.
In a statement, Ashutosh said, “The copy data explosion is creating significant problems for the enterprise and the reason is that a whole slew of traditional, expensive and siloed data backup and recovery applications can’t instantly find, manage and protect ever-increasing data assets.”
“With PAS 5.0, enterprises can create and maintain a single copy of everything in their production environment, eliminating the need for multiple redundant copies. It also recovers data within seconds, which is more important than ever in mission-critical environments,” he added.
Since the cloud is quickly becoming home to more of those mission-critical environments, PAS 5.0 now supports features like multi-tenancy, reporting via Actifio Enterprise Reporter and the company’s Dedup Async replication technology, which reduces network bandwidth requirements by 75 percent over traditional methods. Other cloud services provider-friendly services include test and development tools and remote backup.
Actifio is also targeting Oracle test and development environments with a new low storage footprint, a self-service database cloning feature that can clone a 5 terabyte database in less than 15 minutes. PAS 5.0 also expands on its platform and storage agnostic approach with support for VMware virtual environments and file system data on Windows and Linux and the DAS, NAS and SAN systems that they target.