Actifio Announces Dynamic Data Management Virtualization to Simplify Data Protection

Aug. 17, 2010 - PRLog -- WALTHAM, Mass. - Actifio™, the emerging leader in Data Management Virtualization (DMV), today announced general availability of the first three solutions in the Actifio software suite, Actifio™ DP, for data protection, Actifio™ DR, for disaster recovery and Actifio™ BC, for business continuity. Built on Actifio’s VirtualData Pipeline™ (VDP) technology, these solutions are the first of a series of data management applications, offering radical simplicity, unprecedented agility, and up to an order of magnitude lower cost, while co-existing with the current infrastructure.

While data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity have been business critical initiatives, they also rank at the bottom for deployment, ease of use, and flexibility. Deployments of multiple point tools, each addressing parts of the data lifecycle, has resulted in a complex and expensive infrastructure, with the cost of managing copies of data now exceeding that of managing primary business data. Actifio’s patent-pending VirtualData Pipeline™ technology, transforms the infrastructure from individual silos of point tools to a virtualized solution managing data across the entire lifecycle.

“Organizations face diverse challenges with multiple silos of data and point solutions to manage it all and double-digit data growth is exacerbating the situation as well as data protection strategies,” said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Data management virtualization solutions like Actifio bring true simplicity to underlying storage resources by unifying silos of data and streamlining data protection through a single solution. Actifio removes a huge burden from IT resources, reducing bottom line costs while improving backup times and recovery objectives.”

Driving Down Operational Expenses with Radical Simplicity and Unprecedented Agility
Actifio’s VirtualData Pipeline™ platform is purpose-built to deliver next-generation data management solutions by leveraging the trends of the rapid adoption of server virtualization, backup-to-disk and commoditization of storage. With the theme of delivering radical simplification, Actifio’s solutions enable management of business requirements via a Service catalog that defines the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for each application. Translating business requirements is a 3-click process that includes choosing a business application, appropriate SLA, and virtual resources to deliver the SLA. Also, responding to changes in business requirements is a simple 1-click operation of selecting another SLA.

VirtualData Pipeline™ integrates capacity optimization with data de-duplication, compression, encryption and network usage optimization to virtualize and optimize the copy-store-move-restore operations. Actifio’s unique technology results in zero-backup windows and enables creation of virtual copies of data, with zero-footprint of storage.

Reduce Capital Expense with Storage Virtualization
Traditional data management tools come with bundled disks and users pay by the capacity. Actifio changes the paradigm by de-coupling the management of data from where it is stored. Vendor-independent physical and/or cloud-based storage devices are virtualized into private, public or hybrid clouds, by an integrated storage virtualization engine and used to store the managed copies of business data. Users now have the freedom to re-use existing storage, or de-couple their choice of cost-effective storage for data protection, disaster recovery, business continuity and other data management applications from the choice of primary storage.

Actifio DP, Actifio DR and Actifio BC not only drive down the capital expenses by copying less, storing less and moving less, the radical simplicity of the solutions establishes a new benchmark for reduced operational expense.

“Today, we address the most complex, expensive and rigid part of the IT infrastructure and finally enable the transformation of the data center stack to a fully virtual IT infrastructure,” said Ash Ashutosh, president and CEO, Actifio. “Much like the Server Virtualization paradigm, administrators can use Data Management Virtualization to de-couple data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity operations from the underlying storage infrastructure. The resulting simplicity, flexibility and order of magnitude lower cost is now a proven paradigm shift, validated by our users.”

Actifio DP Customers Lower the Cost and Risk of Data Protection
Wireless technology developer, Airvana, chose Actifio DP to standardize data management across the company to meet business changes and drive down the cost point, while keeping storage technology options open. Using Actifio DP, Airvana realized a reduction of total cost of ownership for data protection by over 70 percent. The company further cut storage costs by over 50 percent by selecting a lower cost storage device for secondary data.

“Actifio DP helps me regain control over my storage environment, enabling consistency, flexibility, and reduced footprint for backup and keeps our options open for technology refresh,” said Brian Dickson, director of IT, Airvana. “It helps us apply our data classification process to meet the business requirements at the right price point.”

Cramer, a digital marketing and event solutions agency, adopted Actifio DP to simplify their data protection, disaster recovery and information availability operations. With Actifio DP, Cramer has reduced the total cost of addressing data protection issues by over 75 percent while reducing the total amount of capacity used for local data protection by 70 percent. The single integrated solution for rapid recovery and operational recovery (Backup/Restore) also eliminated the licensing costs for individual point tools that Cramer had to manage separately. The resulting simplified solution has driven down the time spent by the company’s IT team on data protection and restore by over 90 percent.

“The ability to create tapes for archive from a restored virtual volume, gives us an infinite backup window,” said Deanne Damato, director of IT, Cramer. “We installed Actifio DP in the morning and I was using it on my own in the afternoon. Previously, it was scary to see a data restore ticket on the help desk. Now it’s done in seconds giving me total assurance and reliability.”

Actifio DR Increases Business Availability for Customers Deploying VMware SRM
Focus Technology Solutions quickly leveraged the integrated capabilities of Actifio DR to simplify its data management operations in the IT organization. While the built-in deduplication significantly reduced the storage footprint, Focus was able to further reduce the storage costs by leveraging the storage virtualization capability and deploying a lower cost storage system for local and remote protection data.

Pricing and Availability
Actifio DP, DR and BC are available immediately. For more information, please visit, www.actifio.com.
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About Actifio
Actifio™ delivers the next generation solution for data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity in virtual and physical IT environments. Based on Data Management Virtualization technology, Actifio integrates data deduplication, compression, encryption and bandwidth optimization, along with storage virtualization, to transform individual silos of point tools into a unified data lifecycle management solution. The result is radical simplicity, unprecedented agility and up to an order of magnitude lower cost.

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