Achieving Near-SSD Performance From Cloud Object Storage Brings Best of Both Worlds to Actifio Customers

Actifio, the pioneer of multi-cloud copy data management software, is providing the best of both worlds to customers with the performance they’re accustomed to from expensive high-end storage at a fraction of the cost as they transition to object storage in hybrid and public cloud environments.

The breakthroughs in performance and cost were highlighted at Data-Driven 2020: The Next Normal, Actifio’s annual conference that drew record virtual attendance from IT and business leaders seeking better ways to deliver value and impact during a challenging year.

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According to a recent technical validation report by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), relying on Actifio to back up and recover a 1-terabyte Microsoft SQL Server database using low-cost object storage on Google Cloud Platform provided 95% of the performance of solid-state disks (SSD) at 88% lower cost. ESG also completed a similar report after testing Actifio using an SAP HANA database, with similarly dramatic results.

David Chang, Actifio co-founder, and Chief Product Officer, explained in an interview on theCube, “The original premises of our architecture — being efficient, very scalable and providing instant re-use of data — have held true through multiple waves of technology evolution. The cloud was built on object storage. We decided several years ago that object storage needed to be front and center with everything we do. Object storage is the most scalable, lowest-cost storage available. With all object storage there is a fundamental limit on the per-object performance you can get out of the entire object infrastructure. At Actifio we designed an infrastructure that natively translates block or file storage — that for example Oracle or SQL consumes — and divides that data into many objects that can be spread across the object infrastructure. That is how we get performance that is almost identical to SSD storage.”

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“Now that everything is cloud-first,” Chang continued, “the Actifio platform has evolved into this normalization platform for enterprise customers to maintain legacy databases and achieve the same RPOs and RTOs with the same apps across hybrid and public cloud infrastructures. The ‘next normal’ is that you can have the best of both worlds, you can leverage object storage without changing your application architecture, to get that performance and cost point you need to make that entire business viable. It’s not a one-or-the-other decision.”

The Snowflake-Actifio Parallel

Actifio takes an entirely different approach compared with both legacy data management vendors and hyper-converged backup appliance providers. In a blog titled “The Snowflake of Data Management,” Actifio explains how it achieves these unprecedented results with an architectural approach that is similar to data warehouse innovator Snowflake.

Chang explained the parallels. “Both Actifio and Snowflake independently arrived at the same conclusion four or five years ago, that object storage is the foundation building block and this is how you scale massive infrastructure at a cost that is effective for business models. Snowflake leverages this almost infinite scalability of object storage to store this data lake and therefore they can effectively offer that basic service to customers at a very low cost point. That foundational building block of object storage as the foundation of their service is a big reason they are so popular today.”

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