Logistics Firm Crowley Maritime Opts for Actifio

Actifio, Inc. has been chosen by Crowley Maritime Corporation, a 123-year old provider of liner and logistics services,energy transportation services and technical services, to protect, access, and move its crucial business operations data.

Actifio will enable Crowley to reduce its application and storage footprint by as much as 50%, while making its data more accessible and safer across business units and global geographies.

“Our Technology Transformation Program is an aggressive three year effort to consolidate and optimize our IT infrastructure in a way that provides value across all Crowley lines of business, each one with its own unique needs,” said Edward Sclafani, CTO, Crowley Maritime. “Our goal was nothing short of updating our entire infrastructure for the 21st century. Actifio’s unique ability to streamline, protect, and ensure availability of our core data is critical to the success of this project.“

At the start of the technology transformation program, Crowley faced myriad implementations of disparate technologies, resulting in overlapping technology investments, wasted time and inefficient IT operations. Storage, in particular, was an issue. IT was constantly bombarded with requests for new disk and/or tape resources to backup or provision copies of data for developers. Databases were being copied back and forth without adequate controls. Server sprawl was common.

Actifio enables Crowley to corral all of the firm’s storage and data. First, it helped to consolidate duplicate storage resources at the very basic level, reducing costs and improving operational agility and efficiency. Second, Actifio enabled Crowley to shrink the amount of data stored with de-duplication and compression, which helped them reduce network traffic.

Actifio’s SLA-based data management is allowing Crowley IT to tier or customize data services according to the needs of the different business units and their applications. Crowley IT has a more precise understanding of what it costs to protect and retain different application data. They can then potentially choose an SLA more suitable for business objectives, for instance with a lower cost, longer data retention or faster recovery.

“Crowley is a growing company, and IT needs to be well positioned to scale with this growth,” continued Sclafani. “That means you have to rely on your partners to be able to scale with you. We’re planning on Actifio to be there with us as we continue to expand.“

“Crowley is a great example of an organization leveraging Actifio to transform its IT model from a cost center insulated from the business into an internal service provider, enabling specific business outcomes,” says Ash Ashutosh, CEO, Actifio. “We’re proud to have helped them realize all of the benefits of data virtualization, and even more proud to be partnering with such a storied company on the next leg of their journey.“