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IBM, Actifio Partner on Virtualizing Data Management

IBM and Actifio partner to help companies break away from independent silos of data.

• By Christa Ayer
• 02/10/2014

IBM is adding Actifio's Virtual Data Pipeline technology to its portfolio of cloud-based enterprise offerings. The resulting service – IBM SmartCloud Data Virtualization (SCDV) – helps companies reduce the complexity and cost associated with application data that's bound to physical infrastructure by completely decoupling the two.

Independent silos of hardware and software that support backup, business continuity, development and testing, analytics, and compliance make it difficult to move data where it needs to be in order to be both secure and available to quickly develop the applications that are so vital to business operations. By virtualizing data management, IBM SCDV creates a single physical copy and stores it wherever it makes the most sense for a given customer. The system then uses that physical copy to create virtual copies to support business applications. Actifio's technology provides a model that manages the data without the expense of managing excess copies.

According to IBM, this lets companies reclaim production storage capacity, improve data center utilization, and quickly recover critical servers. Customers can test the recoverability of an application in real-time, without disrupting the production system. The system promises an easy process for testing failover and, in the event of an actual failover, it logs changes and automatically resynchs with the primary production system.