StreamSnap addresses some of the critical disaster recovery challenges currently facing today's enterprises. For many enterprises, off-site Disaster Recovery (DR) processes for critical applications don't meet business requirements, because IT teams aren't able to recover from as recent a copy of data as necessary, because of infrequent and long backup windows. Longer RPOs increase the risk of revenue or cost impacts from lost data.
Additionally recovery time objectives are often missed because the data needed for recovery has to be extracted from a proprietary and deduplicated format, slowing recoveries, i.e. increasing the time a business can't take orders, generate revenue or build products. As an alternative to long recovery times, enterprise IT organisations may be forced to layer additional host- or array-based replication software packages on top of their backup and deduplication investments to meet their RPOs, at notable extra cost and complexity.
The Actifio platform, with StreamSnap, now includes a range of capabilities to alleviate these challenges and minimise the impact of production-site downtime or disasters:
- Data access anywhere, anytime, quickly: Have application data ready for immediate use, in its native format and from a point in time as soon as an hour prior, whenever needed for recovery or test/dev provisioning.
- Infrastructure agnostic: StreamSnap, as part of the Actifio platform, works regardless of the underlying storage technology, in hybrid cloud, private data centre or public cloud environments such as AWS or service provider clouds environments, providing one platform to deliver backup, low RTO and RPO on-site and for DR.
- Resource friendly: Leverage available bandwidth resources, with throttling controls, for the fastest off-site data availability that network bandwidth will permit. Refresh or update the application data with minimal or no impact on the production source application.
- Easy to manage: Being part of the core Actifio product means simple service level agreement (SLA) setup and automation, making it easy to move and provision critical data to meet all administrative requirements.
- Operational flexibility: Actifio with StreamSnap and Resiliency Director provides the widest range of RTO and RPO options in the industry meaning customers can choose how frequently data is protected and how quickly applications can be recovered according to the needs of the business, not the limits of their backup product.
One organisation that is already leveraging StreamSnap's functionality to improve business resiliency and agility is the leading website dedicated to women's health, Lifescript. "We manage large databases, as big as 10TB, that are critical to keeping our website – and business - up and running smoothly at all times," said Jack Hogan, CTO of Lifescript. "Recovering such a large database used to be painfully slow, but with Actifio StreamSnap we've turbo-charged our RPOs to the point where we can replicate a database with as much as 3.5TB of changes per day, without a problem. It hasn't just saved us an immense amount of time and money, it's also going to help us increase the speed, quality and efficiency of application testing and development."
"Copy data management is a strategy that continues to gain wider adoption across a range of use cases, including streamlining enterprise backup and disaster recovery (DR)," states Phil Goodwin, Research Director, Storage Systems and Software at IDC. "Many companies are challenged with minimising their data loss and reducing their recovery point objective (RPO) to keep their business running continuously. Actifio's data virtualisation approach is designed to address the need for low RPO with its new StreamSnap replication, but aims to go a step further by leveraging the DR infrastructure to accelerate new application releases with faster data refreshes."
"Every major, modern organisation in the world today relies heavily on data as the lifeblood of its business," said Ash Ashutosh, CEO and Founder, Actifio. "With the introduction of StreamSnap, we're making it faster, easier and more cost-effective for today's businesses to backup, recover, and use that data whenever and wherever they want. It's giving them piece of mind that their critical data is secure, and allowing them to build better quality applications faster than ever before, delivering real business impact."
