Actifio Manages Virtual Data

Actifio has developed a new approach to dealing with the data management challenges associated with virtual server environments.

The company today rolled out three offerings focused on data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity that all leverage the company’s VirtualData Pipeline technology.

VirtualData Pipeline is a new approach to managing data storage in virtual server environments that is based on new file system developed by Actifo. VirtualData Pipeline is deployed in a series of appliances that make a master copy of every file in the enterprise. When an application requires that file, it can make a request to the Actifio appliance rather than trying to access that file wherever it may be located on the corporate network.

According to Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh, this capability is going to be increasingly important as IT organizations move to the next phase of virtualization. That phase will be characterized by highly mobile virtual machines that will move around the network. Rather than have the applications accessing files across a wide area network, Ashutosh says it will be much faster for applications to access the master copy of those files located on an Actifio appliance.

The Actifio appliance not only manages the synchronization and data deduplication of those files, Ashutosh says, it also allows IT organizations to maintain service level agreements (SLAs) around the performance of applications accessing those files. In effect, says Ashutosh, the Actifio appliances allow IT organizations to finally decouple the management of data from where the data is actually physically stored.