Actifio Achieves Near-SSD Performance at Cost of Object Storage for Cloud Disaster Recovery of SQL Databases

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As Actifio Data Driven 2020 Virtual Event Kicks Off, New Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Testing Finds 88 Percent Lower Cost for Cloud Backup & Disaster Recovery on SQL Workloads

WALTHAM, Mass. – September 15, 2020 — /BackupReview.info/ — Disaster recovery from public cloud backups no longer requires a choice between accepting slow recovery times and paying the high costs of SSD storage. According to a new technical validation report by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), relying on Actifio to back up and recover a 1-terabyte Microsoft SQL Server database using low-cost object storage on Google Cloud Platform provided 95% of the performance of solid-state disks (SSD) at 88% lower cost.

The new findings will be the subject of a session during today’s opening of Actifio Data Driven 2020: The Next Normal, led by ESG’s Brian Garrett and Actifio co-founder David Chang. Technology professionals and business leaders can register here for this and numerous other sessions throughout the September 15-16 virtual event.

Actifio, the pioneer of multi-cloud copy data management software, takes an entirely different approach compared with both legacy data management vendors and hyper-converged backup appliance providers. In a blog titled “The Snowflake of Data Management,” Actifio explains how it achieves these unprecedented results with an architectural approach that is similar to data warehouse innovator Snowflake.

“Whether you are a CIO, VP of IT, or a database administrator (DBA),” the ESG report states, “You are looking at ways to reduce costs while ensuring the performance, resilience, and integrity of your high-performance databases like SQL Server, SAP HANA, and Oracle. If your organization is looking to streamline data protection for your SQL Server databases and optimize disaster recovery, then ESG believes that you should consider the technical and economic advantages of Actifio and Google Cloud Storage.”

ESG, a leading independent analyst firm, modeled and compared the costs that could be expected when deploying a backup and disaster recovery plan with Actifio compared to legacy methods where backups are replicated to a DR location, reconstituted, then presented to an online server instance. ESG completed a similar study using an SAP HANA database on Google Cloud in July, with similarly dramatic results that can be found here.

The study’s author, ESG Senior Validation Analyst Tony Palmer, summarized some of the key findings: “In just 90 minutes, Actifio completed the first full backup and replicated to Nearline storage in the remote GCP region. From this point on, Actifio backed up and replicated in an incremental-forever manner with application consistency. This shrinks the backup window and enables a tighter recovery point objective (RPO), especially important for large SQL Server databases. The recovery for the 965GB database took just five and a half minutes from start to finish.”

ESG’s Data Protection Cloud Strategies report found that, while cloud-based data protection has become mainstream, only 37 percent of organizations send secondary copies of their data to public cloud services for non-protection business use cases such development, testing and analytics. Among the top barriers or challenges identified for re-using secondary data for these business purposes were cost and deployment complexity.

ESG’s Palmer continued, “Actifio has a ‘VMware Storage VMotion’-like migration feature in the cloud called ‘Mount & Migrate.’ Once turned on post-mount and -recovery, this feature—while users are accessing the database—starts copying blocks from the mounted virtual volume to the desired storage tier. Once the copy is done, the volume can be switched to the new storage tier for the SQL Server database with minimal downtime, less than a minute in the testing we observed.”

The validation testing confirmed:

• Actifio’s ease of use to deploy and protect SQL Server databases
• Actifio’s ability to use Nearline object storage for DR copies with equivalent performance to the production environment, a significant capability for performance-sensitive applications like SQL Server
• Automated policy-based backup, replication, and DR resulted in a three-year DR infrastructure cost reduction of 88%

Download the ESG Technology Review here: https://info.actifio.com/sql-on-google-cloud-esg-price/performance-validation-report-actifio

About Actifio
Actifio is the pioneer of multi-cloud copy data management software, enabling organizations to virtualize and deliver their data instantly, anywhere. An enterprise-class software platform powered by patented Virtual Data Pipeline™ technology, Actifio helps accelerate adoption of hybrid, public and multi-cloud strategies, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability. For more, visit Actifio.com or follow @Actifio on Twitter.

Media Contact:
Carissa Ryan, CTP for Actifio
cryan@ctpboston.com

Source: Actifio

Tags: Actifio