Bryant University Deploys Actifio

Bryant University, an university located in Smithfield, RI, needed a single, reliable, advanced capability for backup and DR.

Actifio, Inc. is providing the data protection strategy with a multi-site deployment of its Sky platform for backup and DR while protecting the university’s expanding use of cloud resources and remaining flexible enough to support the needs of web developers.

Bryant considers high-quality, highly responsive IT to be essential to its mission. Replacing its previous backup platform with versatile solution as Actifio was an eye-opening experience.

“Learning how data virtualization works and seeing the amazing speed of data recovery was very impressive,” said Bill Jones, senior technical analyst, Bryant University. “The first thing I would say to a potential customer is that Actifio support has been fantastic from the start. The Actifio technology is excellent, and they provide service and support to match. For example, when we needed to implement reliable Oracle backup, we had regular discussions with the Actifio engineers responsible for Oracle integration. They were there whenever we needed help or advice.“

Bryant’s goal was to find the right platform to do both backup and DR and to quickly restore operations at a hot site if needed. The previous software being used could handle backup, but wasn’t able to handle DR. Bryant’s campus functions as a small city, including libraries and living spaces to telecommunications and IT operations, serving the needs of students, faculty, and administrators. If the campus were to experience an outage, the entire university network would be compromised.

To transition to Actifio, Bryant, with the assistance of OSHEAN, Inc. and Navisite, LLC, created a remote DR site. Actifio engineers were available to coordinate a smooth implementation, and once the DR site was operating, backup was able to be phased in to the remote site as well. The Bryant IT staff are able to manage the new system, and can create fresh database copies every evening in 90% less time than their previous system.