Ditch tape and fly into the public cloud with us, beams bullish Actifio

Actifio can store its virtualised copy data in the public cloud, calling its facility OnVault and saying it replaces tape and dedplicated disk data graveyards. Its press release thunders away, saying that the term "vault" comes from the practice of locking away tape media literally in a physical vault for compliance …

[Mage]

Daft idea

For a start you'd need peered fibre to their data centre.

Public Cloud? Nothing more than Remote transfer via internet to a third party server with no real assurance on privacy, security or reliability.

People would be mad to do this. I suppose some bean counter may insist on it as a "cost saving". If it saves money then the service is a "loss leader" or inadequate.

Only slightly better than copying all your data to /dev/nul

Consumer cloud backup sold by some retail companies has been a disaster already.

Another one for #Cloudfail

[Pascal Monett]

Re: Daft idea

Can only agree. Trusting one's backups to a startup would be the worst possible business continuity choice one can make.

Then again, it's probably only slightly worse than the backup choices most companies seem to make these days. It might even actually work - until they fold, that is. Or until something screws up and they lose data.

After all, all clouds have lost data up to today. Some only a bit, some have lost everything. Do you really want to roll those dice ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Daft idea

It could be a great one, instead...

Law enforcement agency: we need your financial records and emails of the past five years

Company: sorry, sirs, the cloud ate them...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pitched at beancounters?

Look at all this money you're wasting on things you never use! You could save $$$ by using the Cloud! The Cloud! Haven't you heard about the Cloud? Why aren't you using the Cloud?!

[@miketrap]

This release is about cheaper resiliency and faster availability. No one can match it.

"Marketing BS" aside, Chris, backups stored in tapes and dedup appliances are useful for only one thing: Doing restores when you need them. And when you do those restores, they take a long time to do. With tape those restores may not even work. And while dedup appliances are good for a few months of retention, using them for multi year SLAs gets very expensive very very fast.

Actifio also has its own deduplication technology, and it's also great for a few months of retention. The economics get a lot better when you store data for multiple years in object storage, though, whether in the cloud or on prem.

Even more, Actifio is uniquely able to provide instant access to that data in object storage. So you can not only protect that data more cost effectively, you can actually USE it instantly when you need it, for things like on-demand analytics, data warehousing, media streaming, or fast data integrity checks.

None of the other solutions you mentioned can deliver both those economics and that availability. With these new features, Actifio can.

[Jeffrey Nonken]

Re: This release is about cheaper resiliency and faster availability. No one can match it.

I dug through your posts to figure out who you are, because you come across like a shill for the company. CMO, hmm, yeah.

No offense, but I can't trust the opinion of a man whose salary depends on promoting a product.

Your enthusiasm for enthusiastically promoting your product as the be-all to end all, the greatest thing since sliced bread, the only answer that ticks all the boxes, does you credit; it is your job, after all. But marching slogans and market-speak don't tell me if your product is any good.

You might come across as marginally more sincere if you were to mention your relationship with the company in every comment (or at least the first comment you post in every thread), and not let yourself appear to be just another El Reg patron.

Also I have a personal slogan that goes, "Everybody in marketing is a fucking liar." It's not meant personally, it's exaggerated and deliberately provocative, but it makes the point that marketing can't be trusted to be honest about their products.

So what are the flaws and limitations of this wonderful product of yours, I wonder? I bet you a nickel you won't name then in public. If you say anything it'll be the most minor, or things you can hand-wave away.

As an experienced problem-solver and R&D developer, MY job is to find flaws and limitations, pluses and minuses, to consider disaster modes, failure handling and look for edge cases. I see none of that here. ...Actually my job is to find success strategies, but to do that I need the whole picture. Too much spit and polish on your picture. If I can't peel back the pretty chrome panels and see the ugly underside, that picture is worthless to me.

The good news is that I'm not actually in your target market, so my personal cynicism won't affect your bottom line. I'm just a bored R&D developer who was irritated by blatant market-speak by somebody apparently unwilling to be upfront about his company connection. (You didn't actually try to hide it, though, I give you that.)

[wjthompson]

Not much longer now ...

Actifio's core value prop is copy data management - leverage your backups for cloned copies for reporting, analytics, dev, test, qa etc. It's a great and fantastic concept, but the users leveraging this aren't the infrastructure folks you commonly sell backup to, and the application folks aren't oft to force a backup solution on infrastructure folks.

Sales cycles of 9+ months long. Needing to tailor your SDLC to your backup solution to benefit from it (how many developers you know are itching to build processes against legacy infrastructure?). Often too-aggressive sales team lines customers up for failure due to overly-simplifying the resulting target infrastructure against requirements. Very limited application support.

Use snapshots and zero copy clones on your production SAN array, and get a true backup product like Netbackup or Commvault, and dump to S3 if you've got the bandwidth, dollars, and patience.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anon for reasons.

To add, Actifio's support is pretty damn good, and I say this having prior worked for the contractor that took their first-line support calls and emails. Sev1 issues got picked up by their engineers faster than we could get off the phone with the customer.

Hardware maintenance was the same way. I'd see automated alert emails flow through for hardware failures and almost instantly they had new parts out the door that day before customers noticed.