It’s always interesting to watch the light bulb go on for prospects, analysts and press folks when they ‘get’ Actifio and why our technology can be so useful for solving really big IT issues around the data explosion, lengthy backups/restores and overly expensive application development. It’s really quite simple – Actifio is radically simple COPY Data management.
What can give people pause is this concept that there are two different, yet interrelated types of data:
1. Production data, which is the real-time data created and used by business applications. This is a lot of data, and it’s growing at a linear rate that varies from business to business, but averages out to about 8%
2. Copy data, meaning the data created by all the business systems that make a copy of everything in production. Think backup, snapshot, disaster recovery, business continuity, test and development, analytics, information sharing, even compliance… The data created collectively by these systems grows at a geometric rate, depending on the number of these systems deployed in your environment.
If you think about it, we’ve been naming our data for a long time now. There’s hot and cold data – referring to the frequency of access. There’s big and small – referring to the data’s velocity, volume and value. Until Actifio came along and virtualized all the disparate protection and availability storage applications into a single data management appliance, there wasn’t an easy way to distinguish production data vs. copy data. Since we made and stored copies of production data literally everywhere in our data center – our storage environment represented a primordial soup of duplicates. Now with Actifio we have a single system, simply optimized to manage copies of data with a SLA-driven solution that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure.
So in a sense, our Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform is both evolutionary and revolutionary and it’s all about managing copies of data the most effective way possible. A leading storage analyst firm Taneja group just posted a concise paper on the evolution of the copy data management market that you can download here. We welcome you to now reach over and turn on that light bulb and start solving your copy data problem.