Enterprises can be inundated with duplicate copies of data, often by application developers to test apps they are building. Snapshots, backup, replication and continuous data protection may only make things worse by taking up storage space.
Delphix, a California company, is offering a software solution called the Copy Data Engine, which it says on average can cut over a million dollars annually from an organization’s storage costs.
The software creates shared virtual copies that can be provisioned and used on demand. “With the Delphix Copy Data Engine, IT staff can manage data copies like any other data centre resource: by using flexible software instead of expensive, slow hardware,” the company said in a news release.
Priced at US$60,000 a server, the Copy Engine Data can be used for data protection, to recover from outages in minutes; for disaster recovery by enabling data replication and sync across multiple data centres; and data archiving.
Gartner says this is a category of solution called copy data management. Although a number vendors have point solutions, few have integrated features. Delphix is one, and Actifio is another. The research company said in a report last month that copy data management solutions should be deployed when an IT infrastructure has to manage multiple silos of often redundant copies that consume a lot of storage, and to enhance SLAs such as faster recovery time objectives and shorter test/development cycles. It can also be used for application retirement and active archiving.
Delphix says Copy Engine Data  can virtualize any Windows, Linux, or Unix based data source.  It can scale horiztontally, by adding more engines, or vertically, by adding more processors. It can also be deployed in public clouds.
Through a console adminstrators can oversee hundreds of instances of the engine.
