Start-Up Actifio: Protection and Availability Storage Platform

Actifio formally announced a new class of storage system that is optimized for managing copies of production data.

By virtualizing the management and retention of data, the Actifio PAS platform transforms the chaos of multiple silos of data, infrastructure and single function point tools into one, Service Level-driven, virtualized Protection and Availability Storage solution. PAS delivers a simple, application-centric, policy-driven solution that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure, resulting in a 10X reduction in costs.
 
For more than three years PAS platform has been quietly deployed in organizations, ranging from enterprise IT to managed service and cloud providers, freeing them from vendor lock-in and the challenges associated with managing exploding data growth. PAS has proven to eliminate backup and restore windows, enhance business availability and improve the efficiency of existing storage solutions while reducing overall storage costs by up to 90 percent and network utilization by nearly 70 percent. With Actifio, users can manage all copies of production data across virtual, physical and cloud IT infrastructures for on-premise, hosted, hybrid or SaaS deployments of applications.
 
"At NaviSite, we chose to virtualize our IT infrastructure in order to deliver agile services to our customers, and Actifio was a natural choice to address one of the biggest areas of our investment: storage and data management," said R. Brooks Borcherding, president, NaviSite. "By introducing virtualization into data management, Actifio delivers a key service that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure, helping us drive down costs and provide an elegant and cost effective solution for our customers. With its high-touch, truly customer-centric approach and innovative technology, Actifio has proven itself as a committed, long-term data management partner."
 
Actifio PAS: Simple Solution
to Combat Data Storage Cost and Complexity
PAS is built on patented Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology to virtualize management of copies of production data, eliminating redundancies and re-purposing the unique data for multiple data management applications. VDP technology makes it a solution capable of addressing data protection and availability requirements for Big Data applications. VDP is a distributed object file system virtualizing the core primitives of data management: copy, store, move and restore, and enables instant creation of virtual copies of point-in-time data from the collection of unique blocks of data. VDP technology flips the traditional redundant silos of infrastructure and applications on their side and into  pipeline of unique data, which captures data once and re-uses it for multiple business applications.

                                                 Virtual Data Pipeline Basics

 
"There are many challenges with backup solutions today. The top concerns are related to the cost, capability and complexity of currently deployed backup systems. Gartner hears daily from organizations that are seeking significant improvements in their backup practices, and we continue to hear that organizations feel that the backup process needs to be dramatically, not incrementally, improved," said Dave Russell, research vice president, Gartner, Inc. "The greatest challenge with most backup implementations is that they were designed and optimized for a very different environment. The brute-force methodology of scanning the file system for any new and modified data often takes more than 10 times longer than the actual movement of the new data itself."
 
Traditional storage systems are designed to support real-time production data and have been inefficiently used to store the copies for various business requirements. While industry analysts estimate that production data may be growing at 10-40 percent annually, copies of production data have been exploding due to the practice of deploying new single function point tools each time a new business requirement emerges. Copies are made by each point tool, from backup, disaster recovery, snapshot and business continuity solutions, to homegrown or proprietary tools for test and development, compliance, analytics and archival usage. Users end up with individual tools, each independently copying, storing and moving redundant data and restoring overlapping information. The result is an average of 120 duplicate copies of data across potentially dozens of redundant silos, costing the users up to five times more on infrastructure to manage the copies rather than the production data.
 
With Actifio, organizations have a scalable solution that can manage data requirements present in large VM and physical storage environments. Additionally, with only two core concepts to manage, Applications and SLAs, and an ‘consumer grade’ user interface, Actifio has established a new industry benchmark for operational ease of use. Users can protect and recover information instantly, with a few clicks at any location, for any application across any IT environment.
 
"The consumerization of IT is a reality for today’s enterprises, creating the need for an entirely new category of storage: PAS. By applying virtualization to data management and storage we’re giving organizations the power and agility to embrace Big Data, without dragging down network performance or the IT team’s productivity," said Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Actifio. "Our PAS platform unleashes the full potential of any storage technology to protect companies’ existing investments, and instantly optimizes them for the future."
 
All Actifio solutions are available and are priced based on the amount of application production data being managed, independent of how much PAS capacity is being used to store the historical copy of the data.

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Start-Up’s Profile: Actifio
In data management virtualization