Copy Data Management Solution Actifio copy data storage platform lets businesses recover anything instantly, for up to 90% less. Actifio does this by eliminating siloed data protection applications, virtualizing data management to deliver an application-centric, SLA-driven solution that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure. Actifio has helped liberate IT organizations and service providers of all sizes from vendor lock-in and the management challenges associated with exploding data growth. Solution intended to achieve the following objectives: Cost Savings for the BIG data (unstructured data) in the future Radically reduces Data Growth Fixes Backup Problems for both Physical and VM s Instant Recoverability of Data Simple to manage SLA s with automated workflows Meet business requirement to provide best RPO & RTO in a minutes. Actifio: A Better Way To Manage Copy Data Most storage companies are focused on increasing the speed and accessibility of production data. That s important, but Actifio s goal is different. We set out to tame the storage explosion within the enterprise, with a complete, purpose-built storage system designed to radically simplifying copy data management.
Over the last decade, three key inflection points in IT have created the potential for a paradigm shift in data management: Page 2 Server Virtualization In addition to driving down the capital costs of the compute infrastructure, server virtualization has enabled IT organizations to create a Compute Cloud, providing unprecedented flexibility and agility and de-coupling the compute environment from the compute hardware. Backup to disk (B2D) Beginning with eliminating the operational complexity of managing tapes, De-Duplication technology lowered operational costs, resulting in rapid adoption of disk as the backup media of choice. Storage commoditization Disk array technology has become commoditized enough that only 4 vendors deliver over 80% of the market today. Little innovation has occurred in the basic array technology and most of the new capabilities involve optimization technologies like thin provisioning, de-duplication, compression or introduction of new media like SSD. For users, this is now a buyers market, with the opportunity to drive down the capital expense. The convergence of these three trends enabled Actifio to develop its patented Virtual Data Pipeline technology, delivering dramatically enhanced business availability by eliminating backup and restore windows and creating virtual point-in-time copies of data on-demand, for use by any business application. By integrating data deduplication, network, and processor utilization optimization, Actifio s VDP provides the most efficient way to manage data growth while solving your biggest IT challenges around information protection and availability. The Virtual Data Pipeline is a distributed object file system, virtualizing the core primitives of data management copy, store, move and restore to enable instant creation of virtual copies of point-in-time data from the collection of unique blocks of data. Taking advantage of the VDP starts with creating a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to drive the lifecycle of your business application data. The SLA you create in the Actifio PAS interface determines: The frequency of your snapshots, The type of storage in which they ll be kept, for example in the Tier I pool on SAS disk of the most recent snapshots, or in the de-duplicated Tier II pool using capacity optimized SATA drives, A retention policy directing how long they re to be stored, and finally... Whether they re to be replicated to a remote location or cloud service provider in order to provide geographic redundancy.
Page 3 Once you ve created an SLA you ll be able to bind any application or virtual machine to it, again using a simple point- and-click interface to select from among those that appear automatically in the Actifio interface. Click the big blue Protect button, and you re done. After creating and storing a single complete snapshot, our agentless Change Block Tracking technology captures only the changed blocks of your application data, and associates the appropriate application meta-data to prepare them for transfer to the pool. That data is then moved by Actifio s DeDupe Async technology, a custom-built network protocol designed to transfer data with up to 70% less bandwidth than traditional systems that dedupe further downstream. Using far less bandwidth and far less storage than the conventional approach, the Actifio PAS enables a near-zero Recovery Time Objective (RTO) not even possible with those systems. When you need to recover your data, our AppSnapRecover technology parses the underlying object file system to extract information in application format, at whatever recovery point you choose. By directly mounting the recovered data to a server, no data movement is required, resulting in Actifio s life-changing near-zero RTO. Actifio solution deployment has virtually no production performance impact, and requires no change to existing data management applications. Actifio customers often begin by deploying Actifio against a subset of their data protection applications, where it happily coexists with existing applications and infrastructure. Over time the opportunity to eliminate those siloed solutions becomes clear, and Actifio replaces them with a single, elegant solution to the enterprise-wide copy data problem. 1. Data Protection Challenge The legacy technologies for data protection, including backup and recovery software and media, struggle to keep pace with today s data volumes. Most of these tools were built in an era when data centers were comprised of physical systems, overall data sizes were measured in gigabytes, and tape was the media of choice. As a result, it s common to miss backups and suffer from slow and/or unsuccessful restores. Many IT leaders remain uncomfortable in their ability to adequately protect 100% of the data in the business. In 2011, Gartner found that frustration over backup challenges has led to a greater willingness to modernize, and to consider new technologies and vendors for data protection. The time to modernize is now. The right technology vendor will be born in the area of virtualization and big data, have the enterprise scalability required to manage petabyte-and-beyond workloads, and dramatically change the economics in the delivery of assured data protection. 2. Business Continuity Challenge
Page 4 The challenge to maintain continuous business operations through resilient IT solutions is increasing. Budgets are not increasing for disaster recovery and business continuity solutions, yet the business now runs 24/7, data volumes are expanding, and there is less tolerance for data loss or unavailability. Testing the recovery of critical applications, when done at all, is disruptive and expensive from a time, resource, and personnel standpoint. The reality in most enterprises is that testing is done infrequently, and only for a small subset of applications. Forrester Research observed in 2012 business demands for faster and more efficient disaster recovery, coupled with the advent of new recovery solutions and capabilities, are driving an unprecedented number of enterprises to re-evaluate their disaster recovery solutions. The continuity solution of the future must: Deliver near instantaneous recovery of mission critical applications Allow for frequent, non-disruptive failover testing Provide flexible SLA setting by application Achieve assurance of resilience regardless of application, system type, location 3. Active Archive Challenge As data volumes increase, it becomes increasingly difficult for CIOs to effectively manage data throughout its lifecycle. Industry and government regulations force longterm retention of data, while at the same time requiring online access to that data for, among other purposes, discovery requests. The traditional approach of separate silos of data stored offsite on removable media like tape can meet cost-objectives, but create inefficiencies in the timely and assured retrieval of information. In some industries, those delays can spell fines and sanctions. In 2012, Gartner wrote: organizations that focus on data management are investing in policy-based information governance, file virtualization and archiving solutions to address data growth challenges with real success. Next-generation data management will be space and bandwidth efficient to drive economies of scale. Application-centricity will also be critical in order to drive finer-grained data governance policies. And, through virtualization of data and underlying storage, a next-generation solution will be able to leverage existing / low-cost storage for offsite retention, while not sacrificing access and retrieval. 4. Development / Test Challenge
The demand for new applications mobile, collaborative, analytics is increasing, yet many enterprises lack sufficient resources to meet demand. As many as 2,000 new mobile applications are estimated to be released daily. The storage and compute resources required to maintain multiple copies of production databases are scarce and expensive. Delays in development cycles result as developers wait for DBAs, who in turn wait for storage administrators to provision the required space. The business suffers as project delays lead to deferred revenue or customer service impact. Page 5 An ideal solution virtualizes the underlying copy data of production systems like ERP and CRM, delivering instant, non-disruptive access for application development and test without the need for additional storage. The net effect is virtually multiplying the output of a production environment, while simultaneously reducing costs. 5. Data Insights Challenge Businesses of all sizes are looking to gain business advantage from analyzing their customer, partner, supplier, and even machine-generated data like click-streams. This new world of Big Data promises revolutionary benefits, yet the costs related to inefficiencies of data storage and management limit potential. Gartner offers: most big data is underused due to insufficient business strategies and/or tools to ensure data quality and relevance. Therefore, much of the cost of storage for big data is unproductive. To address these challenges, new technologies are required that can cope with surging data volumes, flexibly and cost-effectively. Critical capabilities should include: Capturing only incremental changes vs. wholesale loads to speed data warehouse refreshes Automated cloning for data quality initiatives Data lifecycle management with cost-optimized data placement High performance data management without production resource impact Benefits of Actifio Solution for CUSTOMER Superior recoverability. Agentless data protection Instant application consistent backup Instant restore. Granular restore capabilities Consistency groups
Page 6 Automate the process of creating and maintaining variable SLA s throughout the policy lifecycle. Flexibility to define custom RTO & RPO and retention Create custom service catalog A single, intuitive, management utility for near-term, long-term and DR /BC requirements. Unified data and protection management solution provides superior efficiency and manageability. Snapshots and virtual clones Efficient disk-based retention (global dedupe, compression, incremental block copy) Supports offsite backup, DR and Business Continuity with tiered replication capabilities Reporting Copy Services test & development, P2V, VTP, Analytics, etc. Reduce management and Infrastructure resources LAN & WAN (moving significantly less data) Storage (snapshot reservation, copy services) Agents Operations (Datacenter related) Tape, media, licensing, offsite Flexibility Heterogeneous replication and migration Comprehensive support matrix Scalable scale out model Backend storage flexible BYO or re-purpose Radically Simple Data Protection for VMware, Windows and Unix server environments Define and manage application business requirements with a single Service Level Agreement (SLA) Integrated De-Duplication, Compression, Encryption and Network Optimization No Backup-Windows Create virtual copies, Clones and in-place restores 3-Clicks or less to manage lifecycle
Page 7 Unprecedented Agility to meet dynamic business needs 1-Click change to SLAs Instantly change Data Protection policies for an entire class of applications Use vendor and location independent storage devices for Data Protection store Up to 90% lower cost of ownership Reduce the number of copies of storage by up to 90% Reduce storage footprint for Data Protection by up to 90% Reduce Network utilization by up to 70% Co-Exists with existing Data Protection/Disaster Recovery tools with no changes
Virtualizing the Store Operation Page 8 Once application-consistent changed blocks are imported into Actifio PAS, the next step is to globally deduplicate and compress the changes between the last two snapshots at a block level. Newly captured data is deduplicated across all physical and virtual servers managed by Actifio PAS and is compressed prior to being written to disk. Global data deduplication and compression provide the following benefits: 1. Globally deduplicated and compressed data is economically stored on disk for longer retention 2. Deduplication and compression optimizes the data set for transport between sites Globally Deduplicating and Compressing Changed Data Actifio s Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) File System processes only the blocks that have changed between the last two snapshot-based data captures. This process executes within the Actifio PAS system, offloading all data management processing from the user s production environment. VDP uses patented progressive data processing algorithms to perform this deduplication and optimize the use of storage capacity. Virtualizing the Storage Repository In addition to reducing the storage footprint, Actifio PAS enables the use of any storage repository to store the reduced data footprint. Users can now have their SLA s dictate the type of storage they need to use, rather than be dictated by the vendor or the choice of production data storage device. Many users have re-purposed their existing storage for storing data copies or have opted for lower cost storage devices. This capability further lowers the overall storage costs. Virtualizing the Move Operation Data movement, especially replication, is the single biggest inhibitor to efficient data management in a geographically distributed environment. Actifio delivers robust, efficient and scalable data movement technology that not only drives down the overall network usage but also eliminates the need for a dedicated WAN accelerator/optimizer. In addition to offering traditional synchronous and asynchronous primary storage replication, Actifio PAS leverages its global deduplication and compression to provide efficient data replication between sites. Actifio PAS offers two types of deduplicated data replication: Backup Replication and Dedup-Async Primary Storage Replication.
Page 9 Traditional Primary Storage Replication Actifio offers 2 types of traditional primary storage replication: synchronous and asynchronous. These replications are similar to the replication technologies typically offered by traditional storage arrays. Synchronous replication can be achieved up to a 300 Km distance and will guarantee that all data is synchronized between two sites. Asynchronous replication removes the distance limitation and will send data over the WAN as fast as the bandwidth allows. Both of these technologies are designed for realtime replication of data resulting in every write being replicated between sites. The advantages of using Actifio synchronous or asynchronous replication are:. Actifio replication does not require any storage array vendor licenses as data is sent from one Actifio PAS system to another.. Actifio replication is heterogeneous from any supported array to any supported array. Tier 1 to Tier 2 and/or Vendor A to Vendor B.. Actifio replication preserves write-order, even across multiple LUNs in a consistency group.. Actifio replication is fully integrated with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). Backup Replication The backup replication process begins after the deduplication process ingests and stores the unique data captured by the Copy and Store processes. This workflow minimizes the bandwidth required to move data between locations. A proprietary deduplication-aware replication protocol enables the transmission of only the globally unique blocks that are needed in the remote Actifio PAS system, ensuring the most efficient movement possible. This architecture ensures maximum efficiency for WAN bandwidth utilization. For example, a 1 GB service pack that was applied to 100 Windows VMs would generate much less than 100 GB of replication traffic with Actifio technology. First, the 100 GB of changes would be single instanced down to the 1 GB of common new blocks that were written to each server. Next, a percentage of those blocks are probably already in the dedup repository from previous patches or from existing Windows binaries. Because of this effect, the 1 GB of blocks from the service pack may deduplicate down to 600 MB since the other 400 MB of the blocks are already in the repository. Finally, the 600 MB of new blocks may compress down to 300 MB before being sent over the wire. In this case, 300 MB of data would be sent over the WAN instead of 100 GB of data due to Actifio s global deduplication technology. Furthermore, if the remote site is performing local data protection, it is possible that no data would be transmitted at all as the needed blocks may already exist in the deduplication pool at that site. Dedup-Async Replication The third type of primary storage replication is an industry first, uniquely delivered by Actifio, called Dedup-Async. This is the industry s most efficient way of moving data,
driving down bandwidth requirements while allowing RTOs comparable to traditional synchronous and asynchronous methods. Dedup-Async replication provides asynchronous data replication but uses globally deduplicated and compressed data movement over the network. The Dedup-Async protocol uses the following workflow with an abbreviated cycle time:. Take a snapshot of the physical or virtual server. Deduplicate and compress only the incremental block-level changes since the last cycle. Replicate the new globally unique compressed blocks to the DR site. Rehydrate the new unique blocks to ready the entire dataset for a failover condition Page 10 This approach has all of the benefits of asynchronous storage replication but only uses a fraction of the bandwidth required with traditional replication technologies. It also provides the ability to have application- consistent replicated copies at the DR site, shortening recovery time by avoiding the need for integrity checking that is typically performed with a crash-consistent copy. capture only changed blocks (zero backup window) Instantly mount recovered data (zero restore window) Incremental restore for BC instantly mount recovered data (zero restore window) move only unique blocks (70% less bandwidth) recreate data on demand recreate data on demand store only unique blocks (10X lower storage) Site A Site B In addition, the backup replication and Dedup-Async replication services utilize the same bit stream for even more efficiencies. With traditional technologies, a customer will require bandwidth for primary storage replication as well as backup replication. With Actifio PAS, these two services share the same bandwidth. For example, when the primary storage blocks are replicated by Dedup-Async replication, those blocks do not need to be resent when backup replication starts some time later, since those blocks are already at the DR site. The end result is that both primary storage and backups can be replicated sharing the same globally deduplicated and compressed data stream. The Dedup-Async architecture also allows Actifio to create virtual copies of the data for DR and failover testing without interrupting the flow of data between sites. With Dedup- Async you can perform DR tests of your virtual servers (or physical servers) at any time with no interruption to data replication and with no additional capacity requirements. A virtual copy of the data is created at the DR site and is immediately available for testing
Page 11 or analysis. Dedup-Async also provides sophisticated incremental failback capabilities to make the restoration of service at the primary site very simple in the event of a failover condition to the DR site. Virtualizing the Restore / Recovery Operation Actifio PAS delivers the unique capability to enable applications to directly use pointin-time data without the need for a traditional restore operation. This is because Actifio PAS is an intelligent storage subsystem that can instantly create a view of the application data from a past point in time, and allow applications to access it efficiently via Fibre Channel or iscsi, just as if accessing a traditional storage system. This unique technique of enabling applications to directly access historical data eliminates the traditional restore time and data movement and significantly increases application availability at much lower cost. Any application consistent data point stored in the system can be accessed on any system connected to the Actifio PAS. Common use cases are to recover a VM after a software issue, to retrieve a file that was deleted accidentally, or to use a virtual copy of a production data set for test and development. There are three different methods than can be used to access the data stored on the Actifio PAS: Mount, Clone and Restore. Mount The mount function is the most frequently used data access method as it directly leverages the virtual copies of data stored on the Actifio PAS and the efficient storage array architecture. Since the Actifio PAS already has the data and can service IO directly, there is no need to copy the data anywhere. Virtual copies of the data can be mounted instantly on any system in the environment using efficient block-level protocols including iscsi and Fibre Channel. By eliminating the data movement from the process, data sets of any size can be accessed instantly on any server in the environment, virtual or physical. A 2 TB data set can be accessed in the same amount of time as a 2 GB data set, in seconds, since the data is mounted instead of copied. Virtual copies of any data set can be used for file/folder level recovery, for test and development, or for full VM instant recovery. Actifio PAS can mount one or more of the virtual disks within a point-in- time copy of a VM to a physical host, an existing VM, or a new VM it creates on-the-fly. Actifio PAS presents virtual copies of the desired data set to the chosen ESX server via Fibre Channel or iscsi, and instructs the ESX server to rescan its SCSI buses in order to discover the new virtual disks.
Page 12 When mounting virtual disks to an existing physical host or VM, the user chooses the desired host. For a VM, the new disks are added as Virtual Mode Raw Device Mappings (vrdm) and marked as independent, so that they are not included in subsequent backups of this VM (these disks are already protected from their original VM). If the Actifio Connector is installed on the host, it tries to rescan drives at the OS level to make the new disks available. When creating a new VM, the user specifies a VM name, a vcenter server, and an ESX server, and a datastore. Actifio PAS creates the VM using virtual copies of the point-intime images presented as vrdms and marked as non-independent, so that this VM can be further protected using Actifio PAS if desired. The VM is automatically registered with vcenter but the virtual network interfaces are unplugged in order to avoid network IP conflicts. The datastore specified is only used to host the VM configuration and vrdm mapping files, which consume almost no space in the datastore. Furthermore, the same point-in-time copy can be used to create multiple virtual copies, each mounted to different servers. This can easily allow several test and development servers to operate on separate copies of the same data in parallel, without compromising the original backup and without consuming separate storage for each copy. Each mount uses a storage-level snapshot that keeps track of changes but does not change the source copy. Because only changes from the source copy are stored, this has the advantage of consuming only minimal additional storage for the changes made. Clone The clone function is used to create an independent copy of a data set for any number of reasons: test/development, audit, compliance, data warehousing, forensic analysis, e- discovery, user acceptance testing, etc. Virtual server or physical server data sets can be copied from any application-consistent point in the system to a separate storage location anywhere in the customer environment. For example, a VM running Exchange can be cloned to a new VM that appears exactly as it did 6 months ago for e-discovery. Creating a clone is similar to mounting to a new VM, except that the virtual disks are actually copied to newly created VMDK files in one or more of the ESX server s data stores, as specified by the user. Restore The restore function effectively reverts the production data to look exactly as it did at the time of the data collection point. When restoring a VM, Actifio PAS powers down the production VM, deletes all the virtual disks (all data will be lost), and creates new virtual disks with the same data from the time of the restore point.
Page 13 Restore is the least frequently used data access method because using the Mount method offers faster access to data (there is no copy involved) and the VM can be moved later on, e.g., using Storage vmotion. File and Object Restore In addition to restoring information at volume level, Actifio PAS uses the application and time context of data stored in the VDP File System to allow users to recover information in multiple object formats. This includes file level recovery for Windows systems and object level recovery for Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange systems. These recovery methods are available on virtual machines as well as physical servers.
Page 14 www.actifio.com Meelarp Sokuma, meelasok@metrosystems.co.th Tel. 02-7274011