City of South Portland Opting for Actifio

Actifio, Inc. announced results of its
implementation with the City of South
Portland, Maine.

Among the primary business drivers for installing Actifio’s Protection and
Availability Storage (PAS) platform was the city’s need to reduce the cost and
complexity of managing the ‘copy data’ being created by the many siloed
business systems making redundant copies of application data being generated in
their production environment.

Within a few short weeks of implementation, the city government’s IT team was
able to eliminate its backup software and associated backup and
restore windows, while implementing data replication for DR. This enabled the
city to solve three data management challenges with a single turnkey solution.

Tackling the Copy Data Problem

A major New England city, South Portland has become a center for retail and
industry in the region, with its working waterfront on Portland Harbor and
close proximity to air, marine and highway transportation hubs. Everything that
happens within city government – including finance, public works, police and
fire, library and bus system – is supported by its IT department. While the
production data created by the applications supporting these essential civic
functions was growing steadily, the copy data produced by siloed systems was
the root cause of the city’s exponential data growth.

The city’s systems – including backup, DR, BC, and test and development –
relied on multiple point tools from multiple vendors across several functions.
Each required its own copy of production data, separate licensing fees and
annual software maintenance costs, and took time for the IT staff to learn and
manage. Despite the time and money invested in this patchwork of solutions, it
presented ongoing challenges to meet backup/restore windows and did not meet
the needs of South Portland’s highly virtualized IT environment.

"If there’s a problem with a server
or application, I don’t try to fix it any more. I actually delete the virtual
machine disk, instantly recover from Actifio’s PAS platform and I can have a
new server up and running in less than 15 minutes," said Shawn
Pennington, director of IT, City of South Portland. "It’s that easy with Actifio. Rebuilding the server is now faster than
trying to download tools to clean up the box."

Recover Data Instantly

By
simplifying data management with Actifio and enabling the IT team to recover
any type of data instantly, the city also saves time and money associated with
meeting Freedom of Information Act requests. Under the law, anyone can request
information on any topic and the city must be able to recover the documents
associated with that request.

"Actifio is like an Enterprise IT
time machine for my applications, bringing the flexibility we need to meet
federal requirements in any situation," added Pennington. "We can instantly recover information from
any point in time – not only the last version of a document, but versions of a
document throughout its life."

Actifio addresses protection and availability requirements in physical, virtual
or hybrid IT environments. By connecting directly with South Portland’s virtual
data center, Actifio provides the flexibility to take advantage of the tools
and benefits that a virtualized infrastructure provides. Additionally, by
shrinking multiple copies of data into a single virtualized platform and
applying DeDup Async replication technology, Actifio reduces storage costs and
network bandwidth requirements for the city’s network.

"Federal, state and local
governments are under constant pressure to work more efficiently with a
portfolio of data management applications making their IT operations overly
complex," said Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio. "By eliminating expensive and inflexible data
management tools with Actifio’s PAS Platform, all levels of government can
reduce the cost and complexity of their IT infrastructure to better serve the
public."