A decade ago, the information-technology world faced a serious case of tech sprawl.

As data became more important to the enterprise, IT organizations were seeking to move on from the technical limitations of tape storage by deploying deduplication appliances throughout multiple data centers. There were backups for backups, and production data became an unwieldy monster.

Actifio Inc. seized on this opportunity by pioneering the industry’s first copy data management software platform. Through virtualization, Actifio enabled its customers to collapse physical copies, speed time to access, and move information across any storage platform, ultimately including the cloud.

Last month, the company unveiled Actifio 10c, the latest version of its secure, cloud-centric copy data management platform. The release included a set of significant new capabilities, which reflected the evolving landscape of major cloud provider services, DevOps, and a hybrid IT world.

“Thank you to the customers and the hyperscalers that led us to the 10c release,” said Ashok Ramu (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of cloud solutions at Actifio. “10c really represents what we see as the launchpad for the rest of the cloud journey that Actifio is going to embark upon.”

Ramu spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Boston, Massachusetts. Brian Reagan (pictured, left), chief marketing officer of Actifio, also spoke with Miniman. In a three-series video interview, Ramu and Reagan discussed the latest features announced as part of the 10c release, the growing role of containers in the enterprise, Actifio’s infrastructure-agnostic role, key partnerships, and its support for a DevOps culture. (* Disclosure below.)

Cloning databases to Kubernetes

With the release of 10c, users have an array of services tailored for the cloud-first reality. These include one-click multicloud disaster recovery orchestration, lower cost for SSD storage performance, accelerated cloud migration, and cloud-native snapshot management of virtual machines in Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud Platform.

The new features also include the ability to instantly clone multi-terabyte databases to Kubernetes containers. Actifio envisions this as an important tool for enterprises seeking to accelerate application test and release cycles through backup reuse.

“We’re seeing legacy data being presented into containers and there’s a bridge required for that,” Ramu said. “Containers can be brought up, but they’re lifeless unless you give them data. We marry the data into the container framework.”

Watch Miniman’s interview with Ramu below:

Cross-platform application support

Actifio’s new solutions for containers are also a recognition that applications drive today’s database management, and that starts with the cloud. 10c includes increased application availability for databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle and MySQL.

“As our customers were talking to us about their application modernization, they were moving more of their front-end capabilities to containers and they wanted their data to come with it,” Reagan explained. “We’re also seeing more consideration of building in the cloud as opposed to starting on-premises and then potentially leveraging the cloud ex post facto in terms of the application architecture.”

An important element in Actifio’s approach is that its technology operates across multiple cloud provider platforms, including seven of the hyperscalers. Through a robust set of application programming interfaces, Actifio’s software is designed to integrate seamlessly with any IT service management tools.

“Actifio can do everything in all cloud platforms; we are basically infrastructure neutral,” Ramu said. “I don’t know if you’re running in Azure, Google or Alibaba Cloud; it makes no difference to me. The seamless mobility of data was the key element that a lot of our enterprises took advantage of from an Actifio standpoint.”

Building an ecosystem

While it remains infrastructure neutral, Actifio has developed key relationships with a number of cloud and IT service providers. One of these is with Google Cloud Platform; and through a software-as-a-service offering called Actifio GO, GCP users can enable backup and recovery for cloud-resident and on-premises workloads.

“Google Cloud is probably our most significant go-to-market partner from a cloud standpoint,” Reagan said. “We’ve done a lot of joint engineering work. We are hand in glove with them as their backup and disaster-recovery partner for those cloud workloads.”

Watch Miniman’s interview with Reagan below:

Actifio has been actively building its own ecosystem around the copy data-management space. In addition to its relationship with Google, Actifio also collaborates with Dell EMC on a joint solution that leverages its software with VxRail, VxRack, and a multitude of storage options.

In February, IBM Corp. announced an OEM agreement to leverage Actifio’s Virtual Data Pipeline technology with IBM’s InfoSphere offering. Actifio is also working with IBM to integrate its technology for users of Cloud Pak, a data and analytics platform with built-in governance.

“With Actifio’s normalization platform, you basically can feed any data into Actifio and it presents a unified interface into Cloud Pak,” Ramu said. “You can build your analytics workloads very easily.”

This kind of support for workload development is a key part of Actifio’s enterprise strategy. In a DevOps, cloud-centric world, providing the ability to spin up large databases for immediate use by developers has become part of the firm’s value proposition.

“Thanks to the great infrastructure work the cloud providers do, network is not a problem, compute is not a problem; it’s just available on an API call,” Ramu said. “We’re able to bring up a 150 terabyte Oracle database in three hours. Before Actifio, it used to be maybe 30 days if you were lucky.”

Actifio appears intent on advancing well beyond 10c and its copy data-management technology. Working with partners such as Google, IBM, Dell EMC and SAP, Actifio is also building an ecosystem that can open doors for customers to leverage a wide range of possibilities in the world of hybrid computing.

The cornerstone of that strategy is data and the ability to bring that data to applications. This is what Actifio saw inside its own storage market nearly a decade ago, and it is what guides its direction today.

“Part of our power is the ecosystem power,” Reagan said. “We believe it’s a very complementary ecosystem that we’re building.”

Watch the complete video interview with both Reagan and Ramu below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations here and here. (* Disclosure: Actifio Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Actifio nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE