Jones & Bartlett Learning Opts for Actifio

Actifio, Inc. enabled its customer Jones & Bartlett Learning, a subsidiary of Ascend Learning, to eliminate backup software and reduce overall data protection costs by 85 percent, while delivering world-class disaster recovery.

As a provider of instructional, assessment and learning-performance management solutions for secondary, post-secondary and professional markets, Jones & Bartlett sought to reduce its dependency on tape media for backup while eliminating the growing backup and restore window and gaining stronger protection for its data against site failures and loss.

Jones & Bartlett turned to Actifio’s PAS platform to reduce costs and streamline IT operations while improving the overall user experience. The seven-person IT team at Jones & Bartlett wanted a single data protection and DR solution that was compatible with its VMware-driven virtualized server environment. With the Actifio PAS platform, the simplicity of application-centric data management with SLAs for protection and recovery reduced the number of operational steps while the platform’s effectiveness freed up senior IT team members to focus on more strategic initiatives.

The reduction in costs comes from three areas: elimination of backup software, shrinking the storage footprint and reducing the tape media consumption. Jones & Bartlett joins a growing group of organizations replacing their existing backup software with Actifio’s PAS solution, eliminating $12,000 per month in software license and maintenance costs.

This represented a breakthrough in efficiency according to Jones & Bartlett Vice President of Information Technology James Walsh.

"We are absolutely delighted with Actifio’s PAS platform – it unites all the enabling technologies in one simple, powerful solution simultaneously," said Walsh. "Not only did it dramatically reduce costs and transform our IT operations, the PAS platform also fully supports VMware instant Backup and Restore while reducing our reliance on tape and deploying disaster recovery on an SMB budget without the costly networking expense of WAN accelerators, expensive network pipes and software. For busy, resource-constrained, time-pressed IT teams, Actifio’s PAS platform is truly the most effective data management platform available today."

Walsh and his team evaluated a variety of storage tools – including deduplication backup-to-disk devices, host-level deduplication backup software, replication software/appliances, VMware snapshots and multiple point tools – before selecting Actifio’s PAS platform. According to Walsh, only Actifio’s PAS platform could deliver all of Jones & Bartlett’s data management and protection requirements within a single, cost-efficient solution. After deploying PAS, Walsh and his team realized immediate benefits, including shrinking the storage footprint by more than 95 percent and reducing tape media costs by 65 percent.

"Jones & Bartlett immediately solved its data management and protection challenges by embracing virtualization technology to radically simplify and transform its IT operations," said Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio. "More and more customers are eager to break free from outdated, complex backup solutions using backup software that causes more problems than it solves. Jones & Bartlett joins a rapidly growing base of users who are getting rid of backup software to enhance their backup and data recovery capabilities while achieving dramatic cost savings and operational efficiencies."

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