Actifio Inc. is launching a new cloud-based implementation of its flagship data virtualization technology that offers to help companies protect their applications from outages more effectively. The service tackles a new side of the fundamental operational challenge that the startup has made its goal to address.

Organizations suffer from a great deal of sprawl in their data centers. The problem has historically been associated with unused infrastructure, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The bigger issue is the massive amount of duplicate information scattered across different applications, which is driving up storage requirements and making it that much more difficult to protect everything, creating a parallel challe1nge for backup professionals.

It’s not uncommon for a traditional operation to have a point-solution for every major element of the data protection plan. Added up across all the different types of hardware, workloads and the processes involved, that leaves administrators with sprawling toolchains that are not only costly but unwieldy as well, which in turn can create unacceptable delays when an application goes offline and it’s time to perform a recovery.

Actifio promises to eliminate that complexity with the new service, which is based on its Virtual Data Pipeline, a homegrown technology that offers to drastically shrink the storage requirements of business applications. Instead of keeping a dedicated copy of a file for every process that needs it, the platform keeps a single master version and generates clones as needed, keeping duplicacy to a minimum and freeing up capacity when the information is no longer needed.

According to the company, that approach not only saves resources but also allows customers to quickly recover workloads from Actifio One, as the service is called, when their live instance goes down. That includes both the data as well as the applications that using it.

Rounding out the offering is encryption, access controls and an auditing console for tracking activity. Actifio is marketing the service primarily to mid-size organizations that would rather avoid the hassle of setting up the on-premise edition of its software, but also courting cloud providers. The company’s technology is already being licensed by IBM for SmartCloud Data Virtualization, which launched almost a year ago to the day.

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