Following my research post on data management challenges I wanted to start reviewing a few interesting suppliers. Aparavi has just launched its Active Archive product, which addresses many of the issues.
Who are Aparavi?
Aparavi’s name is derived from the Latin for ‘to make ready’, or ‘prepare’, which is an excellent choice for a supplier specialising in handling secondary data. It is an ‘angel stage’ start up, having secured a $3 million investment from a Swiss backer, with additional funds scheduled. Despite currently being very small it has 2 offices – Aparavi AG in Switzerland and Aparavi Americas, based in Santa Monica, CA.
The management team is made up of Adrian Knapp (Chairman), Rod Christiansen (CTO), Jonathan Calmes (VP of business development) and Jay Hill (VP of product); all have good experience of the storage industry. I was lucky enough to talk with Jonathan Calmes about the full introduction of their Active Archive product.
What have they launched?
Active Archive became ‘generally available’ last week, having been introduced to a number of selected customers in October last year. It is packaged as a SaaS offering and requires on-premise users to install an appliance on site. The software is based on a 3-tier architecture (see Figure), which includes checkpoints and snapshots to eliminate multiple copies of the same data from being stored in secondary storage.
Its current features include:
- Multi-cloud protection ad retention (retention based data reduction)
- Cloud active data pruning
- Open Data format (Amazon S3)
- Multi-cloud recovery and retrieval
- Compliant storage optimisation giving policy-based and on-demand destruction of sensitive data
- Data-centric retention policy based on content and metadata classifications
- Advanced archive search of classified data and metadata
- Storage analytics for tracking usage and trends, which may be useful to help spot Malware attacks
- Auditing and reporting, which logs who changed what and when
- Policy engine (fully automated)
It has been designed to work with Windows and Linux (including Red Hat and Ubuntu). As for ‘multi-cloud’ integration, it’s fitted for use with Google, AWS, Microsoft Azure and the IBM Cloud. Aparavi also cites Wasabi, Caringo, Scality and Cloudian as certified storage partners.
How does it help with data management challenges?
Active Archive is designed to help users manage the long-term data retention and deletion of structured and unstructured data, while many competitive archive and backup programmes only address structured data. It also allows customers to delete bits and blocks for GDPR purposes (a process which includes ‘data pruning’ of information which legally has to be removed after a certain time period), which is more difficult for those users whose software is image based.
As a modern application it is charged on a pay-for-capacity model billed monthly for aggregate usage with no upfront costs, making it easier to try out and cheaper to run than many of its competitors’ offerings.
Who are their competitors?
There are many suppliers of archive and backup software. These are a few (in no particular order) I’ve reviewed in the past:
- IBM’s Spectrum Suite
- Dell Data Protection Suite
- Asigra (I recently had a chat with CEO David Farajun and will be posting an update soon)
- Actifio
- Veritas Backup Exec/NetBackup
- HP Data Protector
- Arcserve
- Acronis
As a new comer Aparavi has built its software on the assumption that enterprises will continue to use hybrid on-premise/cloud resources and will need to comply with data retention and deletion policies of emerging data protection regulations, such as the EU’s GDPR.