01 April 2016

Ash Ashutosh, CEO, Actifio

You’ve heard of server virtualisation and network virtualisation. But have you considered virtualising your data yet?

Server and network virtualisation has brought huge benefits to those who have adopted them, and they are now commonplace in enterprise IT departments. We’ll soon be seeing the same for data virtualisation.

Copy data virtualisation – freeing organisations’ data from their legacy physical infrastructure – is increasingly seen as the way to deal with the huge amounts of data that are produced within organisations by data copying every day. Benefits include increased data protection, instant data access and mobility, but perhaps the most attractive one is the millions it can potentially save organisations.

According to IDC, enterprises have an average of 13 physical copies of critical databases and file systems, all taking up storage space. With virtualisation, they are able to eliminate the need to have multiple physical copies, reducing to the essence of one set of production data and one ‘golden copy’ that can be virtually provisioned when needed. A smaller storage footprint means a smaller storage bill.

To adhere to data protection standards, IT departments adopt overlapping technologies, such as software for backups, snapshots and disaster recovery. Virtualisation removes the need for these redundant technologies by creating virtual data copies from a central golden copy.

According to Gartner, businesses can lose an average of $5,600 per minute in an outage. Dated backup and DR systems are slow to recover data in an outage, taking days or weeks. But when data are virtualised, recovery times drop to minutes or hours, resulting in less risk
for the business.

As virtualised data require less maintenance, there is no longer the necessity for a large IT team to manage data. The time freed up by adoption means the team can focus on important projects that move the business forward.

Virtualisation slashes provisioning time for data required during test and development to less than a minute. With the development team able to focus more on application development and less on the process waiting for the operations team to produce test data, organisations can enjoy faster time-to-market.