Gartner Group – Cool Vendor

Gartner Group: Cool Vendors In Storage Technology 2012

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“Actifio was founded in July 2009 by storage industry veteran Ash Ashutosh, who has several other successful startups to his name. The company focuses on protecting what it refers to as ‘copy data,’ as opposed to production or primary data. Copy data is a superset of backup, snapshot, replication, continuous data protection (CDP) and secondary instances of data for sharing or performing analytics on, as well as longer-term archival data copies. The company’s offering is referred to as a Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) appliance with the lofty ambition of unifying what are typically siloed activities: backup, disaster recovery, business continuity and test and development data. Actifio can be used stand alone or in addition to other backup and data protection solutions. Additionally, Actifio positions the product as being a facilitator of private or public cloud storage by virtualizing data and allowing it to be diverted to other locations, including the cloud, without the need for organizations to build out secondary data centers.

The PAS solution virtualizes the back-end storage, which can write to almost any third-party storage but typically targets an IBM disk array. A unified policy engine acts across all copy data instances and offers autodiscovery of many common applications and underlying storage, obviating the need for scripting and minimizing concern over snapshot consistency groups. The solution claims to drive the backup window to near zero and to offer near-instant recovery of data. Service-level agreements are achieved from a centralized console that operates in a CDP-like fashion, allowing for rollback to specific points in time in the past. Deduplication and compression algorithms are applied to the captured copies of data, which Actifio says can reduce the cost of secondary storage by up to 75%.”