TTX Takes Control of Copy Data Using Actifio

Actifio, Inc. announced that its Copy
storage platform has been selected and deployed by TTX Company, provider of rail car and related freight rail management services, to
cut infrastructure costs by $1.37 million dollars while improving the
availability of their mission critical databases and resiliency of their entire
IT environment.

Since deploying Actifio, TTX has eliminated 3 separate backup and replication
technologies and saved on storage capacity for copy data, ETL offload, and
recovery site storage. Overall, TTX expects 127% ROI by the end of year three
based on the elimination of backup disk requirements, and maintenance of legacy
solutions.

The cornerstone of TTX’s technology infrastructure is an application that
tracks the movement of freight rail cars across the country. Prior to working
with Actifio, TTX underwent a five to six year technology transformation
project to migrate this application database from mainframe to open systems.
This critical task consisted of moving 100TB of data, 30 to 40% of which were
copies maintained by snapshot and replication tools. During the course of the
migration, the project became even more complex by requiring that nine copies
of its production data be created due to the parallel development that
occurred.

According to Bruce Schinelli, CIO, TTX: "Managing, backing up and maintaining so much redundant information was
a major problem that was growing exponentially. As the backbone of our
operations, every bit of information stored in that database is key, and it’s
essential that the data be efficiently managed in real time. We were starting
to see that our current storage system wouldn’t be able to keep up, and when
you add that to the perpetual – and growing – maintenance cost of that system,
it forced us to closely examine our storage strategy."

Given the appeal of a single, unified storage management ecosystem, TTX
examined storage virtualization, but was concerned with handling replication
and recovery, and creating backups for each of its backup systems. It
turned to Actifio for an initial proof of concept and applied the company’s
copy storage platform to a quality assurance copy of its database to
evaluate it in a low-risk scenario. With Actifio, TTX is able to actively move
production data from a legacy primary array to new storage subsystems without
any application outages. This allows to perform maintenance and other tasks
without causing a disruption to the services provided to the organization and
industry.

"It handled all of our mission
critical database backups that we had previously relied on another several
other products for," said Schinelli. "We were really able to see the power and value of the platform when a
hiccup in the underlying storage occurred; because of Actifio we were able to
restart during the process of the conversion and we did not lose any of our
data."

Actifio Copy storage is optimized for managing copies of data, eliminating redundant
silos of infrastructure and data management applications. By virtualizing
the management and retention of data, it transforms the need for multiple
data silos and point tools deployed for backup, DR, BC, compliance, analytics,
and test and development into one, SLA-driven, virtualized storage system.

"Companies like TTX are investing
serious resources to maintain redundant copies of data and are starting to
realize that the technology they’ve relied on for years is starting to buckle
under today’s quickly expanding datacenter. Actifio gives them a new, better
way to manage their data," said Ash Ashutosh, CEO, Actifio. "Our partnership with TTX has alleviated the
concerns they had with virtualization and created a widespread business impact by
cleaning up their data footprint. We help make sure that vital information is
updated in real time and maintained as efficiently as possible."