Buchanan County Government Uses Actifio

Actifio, Inc., announced that its Copy storage platform has been selected and deployed by the Buchanan County (MO) Government for backup, data deduplication, DR and BC across county offices, including the 15 Courthouse Offices and Sheriff’s Department.

With 300 users across its offices, Buchanan County’s data footprint was growing in size as County offices were transitioning to paperless environments and more data was being digitized. 40% of this data was copy data (copies of the data in production created by business systems such as backup, snapshot, DR, BC, test and development, analytics, information sharing, even compliance) which caused storage constraints and cost overruns; Buchanan County was only able to backup a portion of its servers due to limited storage capacity for backups.

According to Buchanan County’s director of IT, Josh Royle: “Not being able to backup all of the county’s data was a major problem. If there had been a catastrophe of any type, important data would have been lost and unrecoverable. Adding server resources and getting the backups running and configured would have taken quite a bit of time. We were able to configure and create SLA’s for the county’s 40+ servers in an afternoon with Actifio.”

Since deploying Actifio, Buchanan County has eliminated tape from its environment, saved three to five hours daily on incremental backups, and 12 hours weekly on labor for backup and recovery management, including tape and tape library maintenance. It also turned 12+ hour full backups each weekend into snapshots every four hours. When a VM crashed, it took the IT team minutes to recover it.

Given the appeal of a solution that could backup all of the county’s servers and manage fast restores from a single console, Buchanan County began looking at tape-less backup solutions. It determined that Actifio met its requirements and given the quick configure time, especially relative to the cost, it became the solution of choice.

“When it comes to backups and BC, Actifio has made our headaches disappear,” continued Royle. “We are able to backup the full capacity of our servers, have eliminated tape and are on track to eliminating production-storage based snapshots as well. Actifio is so simple to manage that training a new employee on data recovery only takes an hour.”

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, Actifio 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.

“Our partnership with Buchanan County has alleviated their biggest concern-losing vital county data in the wake of a disaster and having no way to fully recover it,” said Ash Ashutosh, CEO, Actifio. “We look forward to helping its continued evolution as the county is able to eliminate snapshots and continue to streamline and improve its data center operations-saving time, money and the stress associated with managing growing copy data volumes.“