Does anybody have some change?

August 15, 2012
By Giovanni Tropeano

The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Change. Why do it at all? Sometimes change can be a good thing and sometimes it simply doesn’t make sense. As IT professionals, we’re naturally adverse to the ‘change for change sake’ mantra because we’re ultimately responsible for the infrastructure that makes the businesses run. So, if we can’t answer the following questions about making new technology investments, we’re unlikely to make a change:

Will it slow us down or will it make the business more agile? Will it cost us more or will it save us more to invest strategically? Will it add more complexity or enhance our SLA’s?

With these questions in mind, it’s no wonder why server virtualization has been such a huge technology wave. With ripples back to the time-sharing mainframe era and brought to a full crest by VMware, who over the past 12 years has made x86 virtualization the de facto standard of enterprise computing (& breeding competitors like Hyper-V, KVM and Xen along with an innovation basin of partners).

So why did IT professionals take the big leap into virtualization? Very simply, the benefits massively outweighed the risk (or potential for risk). Also the technology was proven and safe to use. At Actifio, we’re ushering in the 3rd big wave in enterprise computing (1. Open Systems 2. X86 Virtualization 3. Copy Data Management) by virtualizing the core data management primitives of Copy, Store, Move and Restore into our PAS storage system. If you think about all the data protection and availability applications typically handled by siloed data management point tools like backup, snapshot, disaster recovery, business continuity, replication, deduplication, and WAN optimization they all do those same 4 functions – Copy, Store, Move and Restore. So why have 10,000 different ways of doing 4 simple things in the data center? Good question. We think it’s time for a new approach and so do the 120+ Actifio users worldwide. Similar to VMware 12 years ago, our benefits massively outweigh the risk and cost for maintaining separate legacy data management tools. And the technology is proven and endorsed by customer and leading analysts alike.

Does anybody have some change? You will – by adopting PAS and saving a boat-load of budget riding the next great technology wave of Copy Data Management. Check out the details in our video below.