Actifio offers a streamlined approach to data management, spotlighting its ease of use and seamless cloud integration. By eliminating the need for additional OS licenses, Actifio reduces costs while ensuring efficient time-saving backups and rapid recovery solutions.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Actifio | 0.6% |
| Veeam Data Platform | 5.8% |
| Commvault Cloud | 3.4% |
| Other | 90.2% |
| Title | Rating | Mindshare | Recommending | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Veeam Data Platform | 4.3 | 5.8% | 94% | 433 interviewsAdd to research |
| Commvault Cloud | 4.3 | 3.4% | 95% | 113 interviewsAdd to research |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 1 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 5 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 30 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 21 |
| Large Enterprise | 60 |
Actifio integrates well with cloud storage, providing features like the Golden Copy for incremental backups with fast restores. It supports workflows and cloud processes effectively and is known for its excellent backup health monitoring and test environment management without full database copies. Recent user feedback indicates areas for improvements in workflow scheduling and recovery speed, alongside enhanced support for systems like AIX and Oracle.
What features make Actifio stand out?In industries focusing on data backups and test environment management, Actifio is a go-to choice due to its ability to manage non-production databases efficiently, allowing organizations to handle multiple database copies effectively without increasing disk usage. Its capability to back up virtual environments like VMware and Hyper-V ensures that organizations can rely on instant backup and recovery, particularly beneficial in test data management contexts.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Tech Lead / Informix DBA at a wholesaler/distributor with 5,001-10,000 employees | 3.5 | I've used Actifio for several years to deliver database snapshots to dev environments efficiently, though support is weak and upgrades can be tedious; stability is decent, and while not used for backups, it suits our needs fairly well. |
| Senior Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees | 5.0 | We utilized Actifio for backups and test environment refreshes, significantly reducing time and storage needs. The support team was excellent, although support lapsed post-Google acquisition. Actifio outperformed prior tools, achieving 90% storage savings with rapid refreshes. |
| Devsecops & Test Automation Practice Lead at APA Group | 4.0 | I use Actifio for creating non-production databases with Oracle, which helps reduce costs. However, I believe AI features are needed, and it's a drawback that Google has discontinued support for the on-premise version. |
| Data Protection Specialist at Tech Mahindra Limited | 4.0 | I rate this cloud solution highly for its ease of use, reporting, stability, scalability, and excellent support. My main issues are insufficient job feedback and, critically, its lack of AIX support for my servers. |
| IT Analyst at MAGNA SISTEMASMAGNA | 4.0 | I use Actifio for backing up over 550 VMs due to its user-friendly interface and cost efficiency compared to previous solutions like NetBackup. While I miss the Portuguese support, the overall ROI has been positive for our company. |
| Presales (Enterprise Solutions Architect) at a tech services company with 201-500 employees | 4.0 | I value this solution for enterprise backups and rapid recovery, appreciating its easy setup, stability, and budget support. I wish it had better bare-metal recovery for physical environments, but its simplified UI is a plus. |
| Regional Director at value data | 4.0 | I highly value Actifio for its test data management, instant backup, and Golden Copy features. It's stable and scalable. However, I'd like improved recovery speed and broader, including N-1, platform support to reach a perfect score. |
| Works at a religious institution with 10,001+ employees | 5.0 | I value Actifio for scalable VM backups with instant restore and robust cloud integration. Despite a learning curve and limited disk vendor integration, it's cost-effective, well-supported, but I skip its deduplication for OnVault. |
| Sys Admin at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees | 4.5 | Actifio's workflow and mount features enable me to refresh test/dev environments daily, saving significant time and production storage. I've had no issues, but I've requested better workflow scheduling and tape support. |
The main use case for me with Actifio is to provide databases to our development teams. We utilize snapshots or images to manage multiple copies of our production database efficiently without using excessive disk space.
We use Actifio to provide databases to our dev and test environments.
For my use case, I do see some latency with Actifio, but that's something you get used to when you have containers in environments on EC2s and you're effectively an onion with layers upon layers upon layers. So nothing's ever going to be as fast as pure hardware.
What really stands out in Actifio is that it can provide us full copies of the database without having full copies of the database.
The most concerning issue is IBM support. The issue I have with IBM support is that sometimes they don't seem to know their product very well at times. I don't know where the support is coming from, whether it's from IBM or from Google through IBM. I'm not sure who physically does the support. Their knowledge isn't great. Plus, the way we use it is not the focus of Google nowadays. Google, as I understand it, bought the product as an add-on to Google Cloud or whatever as a backup and that's not how we use it.
I do see some problems with Actifio, specifically keeping current with operating systems.
It can be tricky to upgrade Actifio. It can be a challenge. When we've had to do it, we've had to work with their support people, and some of them are just people reading a sheet of instructions. When those instructions are obviously wrong at times because you can tell if you have half a knowledge of what you're doing, it takes ages for them to go off and find someone to explain what's going wrong. So it can be very laborious.
I have been using Actifio for three or four years.
Once we sorted out all our problems with Actifio and our configuration of our database and other components, I would probably rate stability about a seven, and some of it may not be Actifio's issue. It could be some of the other things we are using it in the environment.
The issue I have with IBM support is that sometimes they don't seem to know their product very well at times. I don't know where the support is coming from, whether it's from IBM or from Google through IBM. I'm not sure who physically does the support. Their knowledge isn't great. Plus, the way we use it is not the focus of Google nowadays. Google, as I understand it, bought the product as an add-on to Google Cloud or whatever as a backup and that's not how we use it.
If I were to rate my satisfaction with support from one to ten, I would give it a four.
Neutral
I do not work with the point-in-time recovery feature in Actifio. Our database has that capability. We don't use Actifio as a backup per se.
In terms of Actifio's impact on reducing downtime for production, there is no impact whatsoever. We don't use it for backups. It's just for providing snapshots to lower environments. So it doesn't reduce or increase downtime in any way, shape, or form. It has no bearing on it.
I can't comment on whether Actifio is fairly priced compared to my previous product because I wasn't involved in the purchasing of the prior product.
On a scale of one to ten, I rate Actifio a seven overall.
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 area they could improve was when we were in Azure cloud, and Actifio got bought by Google, they stopped supporting us. So that's an area they could improve.
Actifio was very stable. Whenever they identified bugs, they would promptly provide us with patches. I also want to mention that I work for CGI, a consulting company. Our hosting platform is perfectly suitable for our database backups, but Actifio also offers backups for various other platforms, including VMs and more. So their product is used to back up our hosting platform, which is a big plus.
The product is scalable. However, to ensure optimal scalability, you need to work on the underlying hardware and resources. For example, if your network has limited bandwidth, you need to identify and address the bottlenecks by increasing resources. The product is designed to be scalable, but it requires attention to the underlying resources to ensure sufficient capacity.
For example, they have the appliance on a given server. And that server would work till a certain stage. Then if you see that the resources are low or have reached the capacity, you have to next level of the VM, like, in terms of if there is a memory or CPU or from the appliance to wherever you are hosting, wherever you are presenting that virtual disk, that network traffic, if you see that network traffic is reaching capacity, then you have to add additional. So it's scalable from the design perspective, but you have to work on the underlying resources to make sure they also have that capacity.
I was very impressed with the customer service and support team.
Positive
The initial setup is complex, but the team is very supportive. When you sign the licensing agreement with them, they include a certain amount of support, including the initial setup. So it's not simple to set up, but with the support provided, it was very smooth sailing. We didn't encounter any significant hurdles. If there were any issues, they promptly looked into them and rectified them. The support is part of the licensing cost they provide in the initial stage.
In terms of time, refreshes that used to take 10 to 12 hours were done in half an hour. And in terms of storage in the test environment, it went down by almost 90%. Previously, we would require 150 to 200 terabytes, but now we are down to around 20 or 30 terabytes of space.
We have implemented data management tools. Instead of data masking, we were using Actifio for data management. However, Actifio was not supported in other environments. So, we implemented an architecture using ECFS from Oracle.
Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten because Actifio pioneer in that field. And they were the cheapest as well as they were constantly innovating.
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.
The product must provide AI features. Google has stopped supporting the on-premise version of the tool.
I have been using the solution for three years.
I rate the product stability a seven out of ten.
The product is scalable. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten. We have 40 to 50 users. We use it every day.
I rate the support a seven or eight out of ten.
Neutral
The initial setup was pretty okay. I rate the ease of setup a seven out of ten. The deployment takes a few minutes.
A consultant did the deployment for us.
Actifio is cheaper than other tools. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.
We have switched to another product because Google no longer supports Actifio. I will recommend the product to others because it has helped us. It can be deployed quickly. We can create environments faster. We can also create backups. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.
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.
We've been using the solution for about four months.
The solution has been very stable so far.
There's no problem with scalability. As the product is on the cloud, its scalability is virtually unlimited.
Support is very good. If you have any problems, you can reach out or take their support, and they send out a VM link and help you fix any issues.
Positive
The Google team with their PO and my implementation team implemented and deployed the solution.
I would rate this solution 8 out of 10 for service and support.
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.
Actifio is very, very user-friendly compared to other solutions. The QSA is very good.
I miss the support they used to have in Portuguese. In terms of the product, it would be great to be able to price our backup costs within Actifio itself.
I've been using this solution for two year.
Actifio is very, very stable.
The solution is scalable.
I think the customer service is very good, they generally respond in a few minutes.
We previously used NetBackup which was very expensive and difficult to operate, requiring a specialist that was a big expense. With the switch to Actifio, our backup costs decreased and the cloud backup security Actifio offers helped us make our choice.
It's extremely easy to configure.
We were able to implement internally using the documentation provided by Actifio. It was quite simple and within a few hours, we had started to operate in production.
The ROI has been good for our company.
I think licensing costs are reasonable but we have taxes here in Brazil that make hi-tech products more expensive.
We researched the cost and value of other solutions such as Bacula and Veeam Backup but we ended up opting for Actifio due to the ease of configuration and the ease of operation, neither of which require an expert in order to get good function.
I rate this solution eight out of 10.
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.
Areas that need improvement would be the support for recovery in the physical environment. This includes a bare-metal restore, backing up a physical server, and then restoring the same on a physical server. Currently, it has to be on a virtual server.
In the next release, I would like to see bare-metal restore and a version that is comparable to solutions such as Acronis, where they have less but similar features at a lower cost.
This solution is stable and we have not experienced any issues.
This is a scalable solution.
The initial setup is not complex and I find it to be quite easy.
Normally, we do the proof of concept first and then use the same setup that was done using that, for the production environment.
Pricing is on a case by case basis. They really help us to achieve the customer's needs.
They really support us on pricing.
Our customers are either fully on-premises or fully on the cloud, none are hybrid at the moment.
It's an enterprise solution for large companies. For smaller companies, we recommend other solutions that would be equivalent but can be implemented with a lower budget.
When I speak of backup solutions there are only two that I have in mind. The first is Actifio for enterprise customers who have a good budget, and the second is Acronis, which is for customers who have a lower budget and don't necessarily need all of the features.
I don't have a lot of knowledge on solutions such as Commvault, Veritas, or Dell EMC. I need to have a full understanding of the product before I can recommend it.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
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 feature that is the most valuable is the Golden Copy feature. It is an incremental backup forever and you can restore from any point in time. The restores are also very fast. I also like the database policing. It is good for use with test and development environments.
There are quite a few ways the product can be improved, actually. In terms of recovery the solution is very good, but still can be better. Specifically, they can improve in the area of ease of recovery and improve the speed. Also, the kind of platforms they support should be enhanced. Like now, they have recently started supporting SAP S/4HANA, SAP MaxDB, and SAP MongoDB. This is good, but there are more platforms that can be supported. Obviously this will take time before the platform support for more products appears in the solution. But I think this is one important addition that they need to make.
We have been using this solution for a little more than a year.
It is very stable. The support services are also very good. They have a support center in India, and I think that will help us and our clients to continue to get very good support within our time zone.
Actifio is scalable. It can actually be scaled in Petabytes. So that again is a very, very good option from a scalability point of view. The solution also has support for numerous storage technologies like object storage. It is really getting better over time.
Mostly our customers are enterprise customers who have a lot of need to use realtime data for test data management. It only takes about an hour to get the test data. One of our customers is the leading stock exchange in India. You are not going to stop services to collect test data in that situation, and the number of people that need data on the stock exchange is pretty broad. They need this to make predictions and to select the best investments. Actifio is also being used at one of the leading banks for DevOps purposes. It is used by one of the leading pharmaceutical companies which is into pharmaceuticals and life sciences. We have quite a nice assortment of customers spanning across various industries using Actifio and most of them are enterprise organizations.
I am an ex-IBM employee and I have been working with IBM products for a long, long time. So we have been selling IBM Tivoli Storage Manager in the past, which is now Spectrum Protect. Also, I was selling Veeam in the past. I have a lot of experience with these competing products.
The main difference between Actifio and other solutions that I had experience with is that legacy solutions are very different than the new breed of solutions. Actifio has actually kind of reshaped the backup methodologies. They have a new concept and add a new dimension to the way that data centers were being backed up in the past. They are different if you compare the product to the likes of ScrumWorks or Tivoli or even Veritas for that matter. They have improved things a lot and they have forced others to change. Many of the other products are still backing up to tapes. Actifio does a straight back up to a disk or back up to the cloud. So, that is a big change and a big advantage.
I found that the initial setup was very, very easy. In fact, the infrastructure support was also very, very flexible as Actifio supports almost any kind of infrastructure. It is essentially agnostic to any type of hardware. We can provision it on a virtual machine — it comes as a virtual machine in fact. Because of that, it is easy to deploy on any VMware or any virtual platform.
My team has deployed the real-time solutions for customers with Actifio in as short a time as one or two days.
The way Actifio is shaping up is really good, especially in the way they are opening new avenues for data management — like in terms of test data management, database cloning, and the capability of duplicating databases instantly. Also, it is one of the only solutions which is used by SAP for their own S/4HANA test data management. This one product enables a lot of very good solutions for backup of SAP S/4HANA either on to my systems and appliance or on the cloud. There are these advantages and quite a few other advantages this solution encompasses.
On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as around eight-of-ten. To make it more like a ten or at least nine, they have to take care of some of the possibilities for expanding the capabilities of the product even further. They need more coverage for newer platforms and any of the new databases coming out. For example, MongoDB is getting very popular and needs better support within Actifio. Support for the current versions of databases is good but maybe some backward compatibility and N-minus-one compatibility would be good because not many customers are always current and on the bleeding edge. We had an incident, in fact, where a customer wanted to use Actifio very much, but part of their deployment was on a current version of their database and another part of it was on an older version that was just not supported. So if they would make the effort to support the current versions and maybe N-minus-one that would be great to help bring in legacy players on so they can also use Actifio.
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.
Easy integration with cloud and object storage backup pools. Ability to back up from the cloud and to back up to the cloud: on-prem to cloud, cloud to on-prem, cloud to cloud. We have other backup products that have struggled with this type of integration.
Integration with snap services of disk vendors (they only support IBM and Pure right now). Actifio uses the native backup capabilities of each application (like VADP for VMware), but could benefit from integrating these capabilities with storage subsystems for the best of both worlds.
Nearly all the problems we've had with the product have been caused by the infrastructure not the software. Despite this Actifio support has successfully helped us recover from each issue we've come across.
Performance has been solid, depends mostly on the disk backing the solution. You can use anything supported by the hypervisor for the Sky version of Actifio.
We have also been using IBM TSM/Spectrum Protect and Commvault. Actifio has the right vision of data management, ease of use, and embrace of the cloud.
Set up is super easy...once you learn the process. The learning curve isn't steep, but it's there. Use their professional services to deploy the first few appliances.
In-house handled the hands on work, but we used professional services to guide and train us. The engineer assigned to us was very knowledgeable. Actifio also include a project manager to help get the project completed professionally and on time.
Actifio is very price competitive. They can typically replace any backup solution for less money. Beyond this, the solution allows use of backup data for development, analytics, etc. So, multiple copies of prod data can be eliminated by using the Actifio copy for all the other use cases.
Actifio will add professional services to the quote package. It is valuable to get the ball rolling quickly. While Actifio is a simple product, its feature scope is large and that can mean some learning curve challenges.
Oh yes, we looked at all the major vendors. Veeam came in as a close second. Cohesity was also a top contender.
Actifio is not putting much development into their deduplication technology anymore. Just skip it. The cloud/object store option is called OnVault. It works way better, scales better, and has much more freedom.
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.
There is a lot to improve on and a lot of new features that are needed. Some of these, I have personally requested, for example to be able to set multiple/specific hours/days on the workflow mechanism, and add the ability to support tapes/robot libraries.
I have been working with Actifio for almost two years. I have two Actifio cluster which protects 60TB of data including six VMware machines, SQL database, Oracle database, Windows, and Linux.
We've had no issues with deployment.
We've had no issues with stability.
We've had no issues with scalability.
Actifio is working well and has a lot features and abilities that none of its competitors have.
This product is the best that there is today, as it has replication and it has built–in BCP/DR. It is perfect for test/dev environment creation and much more.
