This article is more than 1 year old

♪ Gallileo, Gallileo, Gallileo, figar-GO, Actifio-oooh-ooh-oh. I'm just a poor backup and nobody loves me...

...He's just a poor backup of a workload running virtually ♪

If you're wondering whether it's possible to protect vSphere virtual machines with no on-premises agents, arrays, appliances or software – and friend, who isn't? – here's something potentially for you.

Actifio is touting direct-to-the-cloud backup for VMware with pay-as-you-go per-virtual-machine pricing.

This SaaS offering is called Actifio GO for VMware, and it uses Actifio’s Sky technology to take incremental forever copies of virtual machines and send then into object stores in AWS (S3, S3 IAS), Azure (Blob Hot, Blob Cold), GCP (Nearline, Regional, Coldline), IBM COS and Wasabi’s public clouds. Once there, virtual machines can be recovered via a direct mount from the cloud vault, and then storage vMotion can move the VMs back to on-premises kit.

Actifio CEO and co-founder Ash Ashutosh told The Reg that GO enables object storage to be viewed as block storage, and so supports direct mounts of backed-up VMs.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. It can be recovered without using Actifio’s Sky technology, meaning no lock-in to the company, we're told.

Tractor sprays wheat crops under a blue sky. Photo by Shutterstock

Actifio launches v8 of Sky Platform, extends dedupe to cloud crowd

READ MORE

Once in the cloud, the backed-up VMs are turned into synthetic full backups, and they can be used to restore damaged on-premises VMs, or for test and developments, analytics and compliance; the usual copy data management code targets.

After you sign up to the service and selecting your destination cloud vault, the first backup will be ready for use in an hour, Actifio says. Users can search their backups using Google-like search through files and folders.

Actifio GO supports local caching for backups that need the fastest-possible restore, it is claimed.

The biz added that GO for VMware is the first in a series of offerings, and we can envisage future GO services targeted at KVM hypervisors and, perhaps, databases such as Oracle, SAP and others.

We note that there is no mention of automated tiering within the clouds; from S3 to Glacier for example, yet Actifio talks of retention from days to decades. El Reg imagines such tiering may be a future GO feature. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like