Last week Gartner included “Copy Data Management” as a category in both its “Hype Cycle for Business Continuity and IT Disaster Recovery Management, 2014” and its “Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, 2014” reports. As they put it, “Many organizations have become acutely aware of the increasing cost of managing copy data, whose capacity is often significantly higher than production storage due to multiple copies for different use cases and less managed retention periods.”
We’ve come a long way from coining this term in 2009, as a way of helping people understand what Actifio did and how it was different from what everybody else was doing at the time.
Ash put it well in the press release we’ve waited a long time to write:
“Five years ago, we recognized the copy data problem as a massive waste of time, cost, and complexity, and set out to fix it with a radically simple solution. Our friends at Gartner were among the first with whom we shared this insight, and over time they’ve helped to shape our thinking about the problem just as I think we’ve helped shape theirs.”
In Gartner’s report (available here), Actifio is both recognized in the new Copy Data Management Category, and cited a total of eight times throughout the two reports in a range of categories including Continuous Data Protection, Data Deduplication, Integrated Backup Appliances, and Recovery Assurance. The sheer volume of these categories points to the scope of Actifio’s technology platform, and its potential to displace the tens of billions being spent worldwide on a tangle of siloed hardware and software making copies they already have and will never need.
The report states that “Copy Data Management technology refers to solutions that use a live clone to consolidate, reduce and centrally manage multiple physical copies of production data that are usually generated by different software tools residing in separate storage locations.” And further explains that “IT organizations have historically used different storage and software products to deliver backup, archive, replication, test/development and other data-intensive services with very little control or management across these services. This results in over-investment in storage capacity, software licenses and operational expenditure costs associated with managing excessive storage and software. Copy data management facilitates the use of one copy of data for all of these functions, thereby dramatically reducing the need for multiple unmanaged copies of data and enabling organizations to cut costs associated with multiple disparate software licenses and storage islands.”
Copy Data Management can be applied across multiple applications to improve business functions. Actifio has worked with hundreds of enterprises who have experienced significant business improvements:
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Texas Wesleyan University improved resiliency, reducing disaster recovery from days to hours and saving $2.5M with Actifio’s Copy Data Storage platform.
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Arise Virtual Solutions used Actifio Sky to improve agility, shrinking recovery times to minutes and saving $500k spent on legacy data protection.
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Sungard Availability Services introduced faster business recovery to hybrid IT environments with Actifio Resiliency Director, 7x faster than their previous solution.
Ash went on to say this (and we think it’s only fair to give him the last word):
“Today marks yet another milestone in the market’s acceptance of this idea, and a further confirmation of what we’ve known all along… that Copy Data Virtualization is the final piece in the puzzle of the virtual data center, a necessary ingredient for unlocking the potential business impact of virtual computing power and virtual networking.”