Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten because Actifio pioneer in that field. And they were the cheapest as well as they were constantly innovating.

Actifio is not putting much development into their deduplication technology anymore. Just skip it. The cloud/object store option is called OnVault. It works way better, scales better, and has much more freedom.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10 for service and support.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

The way Actifio is shaping up is really good, especially in the way they are opening new avenues for data management — like in terms of test data management, database cloning, and the capability of duplicating databases instantly. Also, it is one of the only solutions which is used by SAP for their own S/4HANA test data management. This one product enables a lot of very good solutions for backup of SAP S/4HANA either on to my systems and appliance or on the cloud. There are these advantages and quite a few other advantages this solution encompasses.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as around eight-of-ten. To make it more like a ten or at least nine, they have to take care of some of the possibilities for expanding the capabilities of the product even further. They need more coverage for newer platforms and any of the new databases coming out. For example, MongoDB is getting very popular and needs better support within Actifio. Support for the current versions of databases is good but maybe some backward compatibility and N-minus-one compatibility would be good because not many customers are always current and on the bleeding edge. We had an incident, in fact, where a customer wanted to use Actifio very much, but part of their deployment was on a current version of their database and another part of it was on an older version that was just not supported. So if they would make the effort to support the current versions and maybe N-minus-one that would be great to help bring in legacy players on so they can also use Actifio.  

Our customers are either fully on-premises or fully on the cloud, none are hybrid at the moment.

It's an enterprise solution for large companies. For smaller companies, we recommend other solutions that would be equivalent but can be implemented with a lower budget.

When I speak of backup solutions there are only two that I have in mind. The first is Actifio for enterprise customers who have a good budget, and the second is Acronis, which is for customers who have a lower budget and don't necessarily need all of the features.

I don't have a lot of knowledge on solutions such as Commvault, Veritas, or Dell EMC. I need to have a full understanding of the product before I can recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Actifio is working well and has a lot features and abilities that none of its competitors have.

This product is the best that there is today, as it has replication and it has built–in BCP/DR. It is perfect for test/dev environment creation and much more.