Cost is always an essential element. And it’s not unusual for customers to see expected costs for projected storage additions evaporate after an Actifio deployment. It typically starts first in the realm of excess copy data being eliminated from backup or disaster recovery.
Then, when data virtualization technology is applied to development, test and QA, capacity shrinks again to terabytes less. Costly purchases can be averted. Customer’s can reclaim or recalibrate expenses that would otherwise be wasted. Existing capacity can get redeployed or retired. Energy consumption gets reduced along with the data center storage footprint.
The truism of IT budgets always applies: “Do more with less.” There’s never more budget for IT and that energizes searches for better ways to operate. Doing it this way makes the ranks of CIOs and CTOs and even CEOs open to new thinking – even transformational change.
We know that adoption of DevOps provides a very effective opportunity to enhance application quality and time-to-market. Moving to that model and including data virtualization only adds to the benefits. Instead of using dummy data or creating multiple full copies of production data sets, a single golden copy replaces many physical copies. Instead of multiplying physical copies that drive up costs, virtualized data avoids massive storage expenses and decreases or even eliminates burdens previously placed upon on DBAs. It introduces self-service and near instant access to automatically access database environments along with masked data sets.
In effect, costs are reduced in multiple dimensions – staff costs, capital costs, delay costs, complexity costs, and, most important in the eyes of many business leaders, the costs of time.
It’s another great example of cascading benefits. Many customers initiate their Actifio platform to control copy data proliferation in backup and disaster recovery environments. Then, as familiarity grows, so does understanding of the possibilities. Data virtualization is applied to analytics, data movement, migration, cloud application implementations and more. No longer “backup” but now data management, data virtualization is applied to application development.
Major cost savings quickly multiply and persistent pain points for developers are eliminated when it becomes possible to provision dozens of near instant virtual data copies with minimal storage consumption and achieve enhanced data protection with automated data masking. Development, QA, and test teams get self-service access to full production data sets, fully protected and easily refreshed.
As staff resources become more efficient, they are less stressed. Call it a soft benefit, but lower stress means happier and more productive people.
In of our customer conversations the value and benefit cited most frequently is time. Actifio data management helps business operate more quickly and efficiently. They are accelerating time-to-market with continuous application improvement integration and refresh.
As new software releases are brought more quickly to customers, organizations add value faster. They are more competitive and see direct impacts on revenues and profitability. They reduce the cost of time.
At the outset, the savings and benefits of VMware virtualization were scary for some and maybe a bit of almost unbelievable. But the persuading was done and the IT world changed. We often cite this as parallel to the Actifio story – to the benefits we bring through data virtualization. Even more impactful when extended across an enterprise to include DevOps. It’s a compelling set of operational and economic opportunities not easy to ignore.
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