The world of data lifecycle, replication, and recovery on a moment’s notice has becoming very hot lately. We’ve seen the launch of many new platforms possessing very interesting approaches to data resiliency that take the old school world of backup/recovery and disaster recovery to new paradigms of Recovery Point and Recovery Time objectives.

I find that the newer players in the space do more than solidify new approaches, they also validate the CDP market and the approach that Actifio has been quietly covering for over six years.

The concept is deceptively simple. Data copies, always online, always available, provide the benefits of easily acceptable restoration of files, easily mountable duplicate datasets for testing or recovery purposes, and for testing. That data is always available, and because of RBAC controls, usable for practically any purpose by those persons with appropriate access.

Actifio has developed extensions to the REST API set that are quite robust and beyond the norm for REST standards.

Included into this dataset are the abilities to replicate across the datacenter’s disc and into AWS in replicatable and accessible copies.

All changes immediately and powerfully replicate to wherever the administrator has dictated.

As @CincyStorage (Mark May) has very astutely said in his posting here, the simple desire for a DBA to snap a copy of a database to test a replica for whatever reason, can involve the inclusion of Firewall, switch, server, or virtualization teams in order to gain appropriate entrée to that database. That adds complexity, overhead, and in a very important way, time to the process. With other approaches, that’s daunting at least, but with Actifio’s approach, the process can be trivial, and can allow for the DBA to simply do their work on the database, wherever they choose to stand up that dataset, and get the work done.

The last presentation I saw from Actifio occurred probably 3 years ago, and I must say that the one presentation received at #TFD11 (Tech Field Day 11) shows significant feature-set improvement, quite wonderful UI enhancement, and a level of functionality under the skin that truly impressed me.

As I’ve said, tools similar to this are proving to be more and more the reality, and not some ephemeral goal that administrators can only hope to achieve.