Actifio Adds Wide Multicloud DR Capabilities to Sky 9 Platform

Actifio is expanding its flagship Sky Platform to now include multicloud disaster recovery automation capabilities to give enterprise users more options for how they use and store their critical business data using the data-as-a-service platform. 

The new Multi-Cloud Mobility and Automation features for the Actifio Sky Platform were unveiled at the company’s annual user conference in Boston as the latest additions to help business users and the channel better protect business data through improved disaster-recovery capabilities.

The Sky Platform will now support disaster recovery using the Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure, after previously only being compatible with the Amazon AWS, Brian Reagan, chief marketing officer for Actifio, told Channel Futures. The new multicloud disaster recovery capabilities fulfill feature expansion plans that the company had unveiled to customers and the channel about 18 months ago.

Actifio’s Brian Reagan

“This adds multicloud and deepens application-level support and brings it all together,” said Reagan. “It is the ability to take data from on-premises and efficiently move it into the cloud.”

And by using cheaper object storage instead of block storage, Actifio helps customers dramatically lower the cost of the data storage while avoiding performance degradation through some special tweaks, he said.

“Object storage typically comes with a performance hit,” said Reagan. “Actifio speeds it up with near block-level performance out of an object backend. As a result, object storage is typically one-sixth to one-third the cost of block storage.”

For the channel, the new multicloud and disaster recovery automation features add value because they allow the channel to offer customers compatibility with whichever cloud platform a customer wants to use, said Reagan.

“The channel itself can be independent solution providers and go wherever the client wants them to go,” he said.

The new capabilities also give partners more options to provide additional services and support, he said, which can add revenue and growth. Customers and the channel asked for the new capabilities.

“This gives our channel partners another arrow in their quiver,” Reagan said.

Scott Mabe, a presales agent with Onix, a  Cleveland-area cloud solutions provider and an Actifio channel partner, said the expanded cloud disaster recovery capabilities in the latest version of Actifio Sky will make it a lot easier to replicate customer data across the cloud.

Onix’s Scott Mabe

“We’ve been a Google platform partner since 2002 and having that Google platform to use it with this is huge for us,” said Mabe. “We want to meet the customers where they are and this will help. AWS has held the market share forever, but Azure is coming right in their footprint. Some customers want to use other things and this will be helpful to do that.”

More customers today want to consider multicloud or hybrid cloud, he said, and Google has been rolling out more services like Google Kubernetes Engine on premises, which all require wider capabilities than were previously offered by Actifio.

“It’s going to open up a lot of new doors and open up a lot of new ways for people to work with our technologies,” said Mabe. “For us, that’s a lot of fun.

Christophe Bertrand, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), said the expanded Actifio backup and disaster recovery features address important …

… issues that enterprises of all sizes face.

“In business continuity and disaster recovery, time is money and time is risk, and reducing risk and costs are key mandates and challenges based on ESG research,” said Bertrand. “Actifio is hitting a double bull’s-eye with this release.”

The strengths of the feature updates are that they build on existing features while also combining them, he said. Also important is that the services are a cloud-native VM recovery product that uses multicloud and automation for the whole process, he added.

“The net result from an operational and business perspective is that users can further optimize Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and get on-demand DR which can also be used for BC/DR testing or other business purposes,” said Bertrand.

Also notable is the all-new flexibility to move across various clouds as desired with the latest version, he said.

“Our research suggests that many organizations use multi-cloud topologies but typically one vendor will be the majority holder,” said Bertrand. “This is a good feature for channel partners when involved in migration projects.”