Actifio Reviews

We use the solution on our non-production database. We use it to spin up non-production environments using Oracle.

The product helps to create new non-production databases. The solution helps reduce costs.

We used Actifio for two things. One was for backups, and the other one was to refresh test environments with production data. For example, we have a production environment and around 17 or 18 test environments where the functional team and the development team want to make different changes and test them. 

Previously, it used to take us about 8-10 hours, but with Actifio, the setup allowed us to do it in half an hour. Additionally, it also resulted in significant space savings. Previously, we required around 150 terabytes for 17 environments like that, but now we are able to achieve almost 90% savings.

The other thing was that our database in production was around 8 to 10 terabytes, but one of the other federal agencies they have a data warehouse that is almost 100 to 200 terabytes or even more. They mentioned that without Actifio, they wouldn't be able to do refreshes in terms of time and space.

The most important feature for us was the time savings achieved through refreshes.

The other thing that was very good was the support team. Initially, when we set up the product, they didn't have the functionality for refreshing PDBs. However, they worked with us to make it happen before we went live. Not only the functionality, but the support team was great. The people who were supporting us were highly skilled. As someone with many years of database experience, I was amazed.

The ease of use is most valuable. The user interface is easy to manage. It is in the GCP cloud, so it's got cloud workflows.

The reporting is very good. It gives a good idea about setup and everything related to backups,  whether it's capacity, planning, pure success, or backup health – everything is covered. 

We'd like to see more stats and details on what's happening in running jobs. We don't get much feedback from the client or the logging. Clients can go into their logging directories to find out what's happening. However, we have to access the log activity itself to see if any progress has been made and if it's been completed. 

If a job doesn't finish, we need to know what the errors were to get a high-level idea of the challenges. When we're troubleshooting, we go to the connected log. Then Actifio support also looks in the log and uploads some of what it sees to their ticket and then resolves the issue.

Another issue is the solution doesn't support AIX software or in the cloud, and we have a lot of servers running on AIX and Oracle. 

I use this solution for backing up my's VMs. Today we have more than 550 VMs in production performing backup by Actifio. I'm an IT analyst. 

With Actifio we feel very safe in the operation of services, because if the worst happens, we know that we have our backup intact and safe.

There are many use cases for Actifio. It is most popular for the test data management feature in the solution, and the capabilities for instant backup and recovery.  

It is very important for any organization to be able to complete their development cycle very quickly. This product helps us to get a proper output for our projects. We have to be able to do their data provisioning for development. Usually, this can take a lot of time in waiting for approvals and time for the DBAs to provision the data. That data, when provisioned, will not really be point-in-time and not really instantaneous.  

Because of the Gold Copy concept, Actifio creates a situation where it is easy to provision data via test data management, and I can provision data for various test developers. I do not need an additional license for adding additional users because they have this concept of unified copies. I can provision and mark those users. I save a lot of space because if I have a 20 Gig database and I want to provision to 20 users, I would need to make 20 copies of it on the appliance. In this case, using Actifio, I can just provision only one copy and then work with the Golden Copy concept so developers can work on their own individual copy of the data. It is a virtual copy and that offers a lot of advantages to the DevOps teams.  

Similarly, for analytics, nobody runs analytics on real-time data on the production environment. So let us say a CEO wants data from yesterday night. You can actually take a copy of that data from that time and run analytics on the data. It is very close to getting real-time analytics. This kind of solution is something that our customers appreciate. The feature Actifio has using test data management and copy management helps the clients work to achieve their requirements and virtually process up-to-the-minute data.  

The primary use case of this solution is for backups and for testing the environment. The backup can be used for your test environment.

Some of the most valuable features are that you can use the backup for a test environment, with the rapid recovery done using just a few clicks. 

Also, it has a very simplified user interface. 

You can deploy it as an appliance without necessarily having to purchase the operating system licenses and the support that you get when you are selling to a client who has budget restrictions. They will assist me in achieving whatever budget issue the client may be having.

Backup of virtual environments (VMware and Hyper-V). The scale is good, we are backing up over 3000 VM's with Actifio today. We have also run successful POC's with backups at remote offices and backups of SQL databases. We plan to continue rolling out this product to other workloads.

The solution provides "instant restore" capability. It allows you to mount images from the backup pool back into production and run in that state. The mount function works as either a bare-metal restore of an entire VM or a drive letter / filesystem mounted back into a running VM for copy or comparison.

• Workflow 
• Mount (instance recovery)

Due to the mount and workflow I refresh several SQL and Oracle databases for the Test/Dev host without taking up any production storage space. It also allows me to refresh those test/dev environment on a daily basis with built-in schedules. This means that things that took me days to perform today, now take me 20 minutes.