Actifio Enhanced Products and Services for Copy Storage

Actifio
Inc. announced product and service enhancements designed to make
managing copy data – and transforming the economics of enterprise
storage – easier.

The company introduced products and
service packages, a ‘pay-per-use’ utility pricing option, deployment
tools, and a suite of features in its 5.1 release. The enhancements
are designed to invite customers and channel partners to choose
Actifio’s economic value proposition, which propelled the company to
700% growth in 2012.

Today’s enterprise IT infrastructure
faces a wave of data, coupled with the cost and complexity of the
software tools, hardware, and personnel required to manage it. IT
executives are recognizing that the driver of this growth is the copy
data – redundant copies of corporate data created by point tools to
meet the BR to protect, share, and analyze information. With a
solution to address the root cause of the copy data problem – siloed
data protection and availability applications – the company offers
customers the ability to recover anything for a TCO up to 90% less
than the traditional model.

• Simplified Packaging &
  Pricing

To make it easier for channel partners
and customers to embrace the model, the company announced its
100T product package. It is designed for deployment by mid-sized IT
organizations, or departments of larger IT organizations. It protects
both physical and virtual IT environments with data management
technology, and features Actifio Optimized Storage capable of
protecting up to 100TB of production data and 1,000 VMs. The 100Ts
can be combined in a scale-out architecture to support up to 2PB of
production data, with custom configuration of the appliance.

To help customers take advantage of
their existing storage, the company also announced Actifio Gateway, a
hardware and software tandem that doesn’t include its own storage,
but instead can virtualize and manage third party storage devices. It
is designed for regionally and globally distributed enterprises,
including cloud and managed service providers. It’s built for a mix
of physical, virtual, and heterogeneous server and storage
infrastructure, and also scales to handle multi-petabyte of data.

• Utility Pricing
  Model Option

Pricing model enables
customers to pay as their data volumes grow, avoiding the up-front
capital requirements that challenge many procurement cycles. The
utility pricing for a complete storage system – hardware, software,
storage, installation, and maintenance – is based on a per-TB
per-year basis, with rates decreasing as volumes increase. Customers
who wish to purchase the hardware and services through traditional
means will still have that option.

• Wizard Slashes Setup
  Time Up To 80%

The 5.1 version of Actifio’s copy data
storage system also includes configuration wizards that reduce
deployment cycles by as much as 80% over its last generation models.

• New Software
  Functionality

The company is also introducing version
5.1 of its software, which includes features in the areas of data
governance, business resilience, and service management. As
enterprise environments put the focus on security and control of
application data, the company has ramped-up its data governance
features to include SLA-based data integrity validation; enhanced SLA
compliance reporting; user/role-based auditing; LDAP and Active
Directory integration; and disk-to tape enhancements integrated into
Actifio’s SLA Lifecycle Manager for compliance-oriented, long-term
retention.

The company has expanded the data
access capabilities of its copy data storage platform with three new
capabilities:

• Bare Metal Restore to allow for
  recovery and rebuild of Windows and Linux servers, including to
  dissimilar hardware.

• Test Failover to allow for
  non-disruptive DR tests as often as needed

• FailBack and SyncBack help to
  resume operations after a disaster by moving uniquely changed
  application data from the DR site back to the primary site, once it’s
  ready to resume operations

Service providers have chosen Actifio
to accelerate service introduction, deliver functionality and
customer satisfaction, and improve their business margins. Actifio
5.1 advance service management functionality by addressing operations
and delivery needs with system monitoring, alert correlation and
processing, auto-updates, VPN access enhancements, and integrated
reporting.

The ESG analyst firm has independently
validated that Actifio 5.1 can provide almost 300% IT efficiency
savings over the competition, and a 400% better annual TCO than
alternative storage solutions.

"In a world that moves faster
than ever, enterprises faces what we call ‘The Agility
Imperative,‘" said Actifio founder and CEO Ash Ashutosh.
"Actifio was designed from the start to free businesses from
the undue burden of wildly redundant copy data, free IT executives
from the complex tangle of data protection and availability
applications consuming more and more of their IT budgets, and free IT
managers from the stress of unmet SLA’s and recovery time objectives
impossible to deliver with 20th century technology. These
enhancements take us further down that path, making radically simple
copy data storage easier to buy, deploy, and love than ever before."

"We deployed the 100T and
within fifteen minutes Actifio was configured and online. An hour
later it was customized to our environment, backing up, dedupe
and replicating to our DR facility 3000 miles away," said
Daniel Acosta, IT Director, MC
Assembly. "If something goes wrong, now I just go back in
time and mount the snapshot directly from Actifio. To our users it
looks like a server reboot, to us it’s the ultimate peace of mind."

"Technology is an invaluable
learning tool here at the university, which means that I need to plan
for maximum uptime and availability. In the past this meant frequent
data protection and business resiliency testing that required
planning, application downtime and costly excess infrastructure which
ultimately impacted our users," said Rich Siedzik, senior IT director, Bryant University.
"That was before Actifio where we now have the ability to run
Failover Test non-disruptively as often as needed. And if there’s a
site failure, I can easily and automatically sync back our unique
data."

According to analysts of Taneja, "For a long time the storage
indeustry has focused heavily on primary production storage, not
realizing that the cost of ‘copy‘ storage
has been growing exponentially to the point where it costs more than
primary storage. Moreover, it certainly is a pain to manage and grow.
Actifio’s microscopic focus on relieving pressure on this ‘copy‘
storage (which, by the way, includes backup, restore, snapshots,
replication and more) may not appear so but it is indeed a paradigm
shift. With the new release, Actifio has simplified the delivery for
all customers and enhanced its appeal for service providers."

"The challenges associated with
large volumes of unmanaged data have historically focused on cost and
risk. But a larger challenge is that no one department has end-to-end
responsibility for the data," said Shelia Childs, managing
VP, Gartner, and Alan Dayley, research director, Gartner, in a report
titled, Use These Unstructured Data Management Best Practices to
Manage Based on the Time Value of Data, published November 16, 2012.
The report continues: "Progressive organizations are
realizing that information can give the business a competitive edge
if that information is well-managed and accessible in a way that
optimizes its usefulness. The business inherently realizes that it
cares more about some data than other data, and should fine-tune its
applications and environment to address information costs, risks and,
especially, value."

"Copy data is everywhere – it
could start off with multiple copies of the same file, move on to
multiple copies of the volume, application data, backups, test/dev,
online copies for operational and DR…the list goes on,"
said Ashish Nadkarni, IDC storage research director. "In fact
in a recent IDC study, we found that nearly 75% of all data generated
is copy data. Which means only 25% of all data generated is unique –
everything else is copy data. That is a staggering number and exposes
the tip of the iceberg of how serious this problem really is."

"Many enterprises struggle with
exponential data growth, shrinking backup windows, and static budgets
– which leads to the classic conundrum of how to back up more data in
less time with the same amount of money," wrote report
author Rachel Dines, Forrester Research Inc.’s senior analyst, serving
infrastructure and operations in a November, 2010 report titled Market Overview: Enterprise-Class Backup And Recovery Software.