Swisslos enhances business resiliency

Headquartered in Basel Switzerland, Swisslos needed a better data management strategy to support increasing demand and data protection requirement for its number draws, lots, and sports betting products. Despite its complex internal mix of different operating systems, databases, and server architectures, Swisslos was able to replace its legacy backup systems in a matter of weeks with a Actifio’s modern, efficient data virtualization platform.

Actifio virtualizes data as other technologies have virtualized compute and networking, decoupling management of increasingly strategic enterprise data from increasingly commoditized enterprise infrastructure. Actifio replaces isolated point tools that create redundant copies of production data with a single solution. Instead of stand-alone systems for data management, organisations get one simple, application-oriented, SLA-based solution. IDC estimates the worldwide market for products and services in this space, which it refers to as copy data management, at $46 Billion in 2014.

To date more than 500 enterprise users and cloud service providers (CSP) across 36 countries have chosen Actifio’s Copy Data Virtualization platform and the recently introduced Actifio Resiliency Director for business agility, resiliency, and access to the cloud for their most critical application platforms including SAP, Oracle, VMware, HP-UX, AIX, iSeries, and Microsoft.

"For the key functions almost all vendors use the same or similar technologies. Beyond the standard features, it was very important for us that all our systems could be protected and restored. Actifio proved to be more innovative and has more technological potential compared to its competitors," said Marc Monnier, CIO at Swisslos. The solution has already proved its worth at Swisslos and offers significant advantages, as Monnier explained, " Actifio’s Incremental-Forever feature backs up data, saving us precious time. Now our biggest problem with the backup window is history. In all the tests we carried out we were able to recover our data very quickly. Thanks to Actifio’s efficient de-duplication and compression, we can even accommodate very large amounts of data or many versions with relatively small space. Actifio’s SLA concept allows the backup administrator to easily carry out even the most complex requirements".

In support of mid and large enterprises, like Swisslos, Actifio delivers Copy Data Virtualization through the certified configuration and deployment of an integrated appliance, called Actifio CDS. Actifio CDS supports a complete range of enterprise platforms (VMware, Windows, Linux, AIX, HP-UX, AS/400, Unix, Solaris…), applications (SQL, Oracle, Exchange, Sharepoint, SAP, DB2…), and use cases (backup, snapshot, BC/DR, dev & test, compliance, analytics…) across all vertical industries, in 34 countries with over an exabyte of application data under management.

Actifio’s concept of managing virtual copies is based on capturing a ‘Golden Copy’ of data, from which as many virtual copies can be created and made available anytime, anywhere as is required. At the heart of Actifio CDS is the Virtual Data Pipeline ™ (VDP) technology. VDP’s function is to virtualise the management of copy data production in order to eliminate redundancies and provide the unique data of various applications. Actifio´s VDP only records changes made to the "Golden Copy" on the server and allows direct access to virtual data copies without the need for moving physical data.

The IT specialist at Swisslos has come to a positive conclusion about Actifio’s Copy Data Virtualisation platform, "Actifio´s solution simplifies certain processes and helps us in the long term to overcome our specific challenges regarding data protection. The biggest challenge we had previously was to back-up the enormous growth of data in the same time. With Actifio, we can now capture all our data, and manage it across different operating systems, databases and server architectures, in an efficient and reliable way while achieving significant savings in time and space."