News Article
Actifio gets easier to buy, approve, deploy and use
February 5, 2013
The company introduced new product and service packages, a storage industry-first “pay-per-use” utility pricing option, new deployment tools, and a suite of new features in its 5.1 software release. The enhancements are designed to ease the way for customers and channel partners to embrace Actifio’s compelling economic value proposition, which propelled the company to 700 percent growth in 2012.
“Many enterprises struggle with exponential data growth, shrinking backup windows, and static budgets — which leads to the classic conundrum of how to back up more data in less time with the same amount of money”
Today’s enterprise IT infrastructure faces a tidal wave of data, coupled with the growing cost and complexity of the software tools, hardware, and personnel required to manage it. Savvy IT executives are recognizing that the driver of this exponential growth is the copy data – redundant copies of corporate data created by point tools to meet the business requirements to protect, share, and analyze information. With a purpose-built solution to address the root cause of the copy data problem – siloed data protection and availability applications – Actifio offers customers the ability to recover anything instantly for a total cost of ownership up to 90 percent less than the traditional model.
Easy to buy: Simplified Packaging & Pricing
To make it easier for channel partners and customers to embrace the Actifio model, the company today announced its new 100T product package. The new Actifio 100T is designed for rapid deployment by mid-sized IT organizations, or departments of larger IT organizations. It protects both physical and virtual IT environments with the world’s most efficient data management technology, and features integrated Actifio Optimized Storage capable of protecting up to 100 Terabytes of production data and 1,000 virtual machines. Actifio 100Ts can be combined in a scale-out architecture to support up to 2 PetaBytes of production data, with custom configuration of the appliance.
To help customers take better advantage of their existing storage, the company also announced its new Actifio Gateway, a similarly robust hardware and software tandem that doesn’t include its own storage, but instead can virtualize and manage a wide variety of third party storage devices. The Actifio Gateway is designed for regionally and globally distributed enterprises, including cloud and managed service providers. It’s built for a large mix of physical, virtual, and heterogeneous server and storage infrastructure, and also scales to handle multi-petabytes of data.
Easy to approve: Utility Pricing Model Option
Actifio’s revolutionary new utility pricing model enables customers to pay as their data volumes grow, avoiding the significant up-front capital requirements that challenge many procurement cycles. Actifio’s all-inclusive utility pricing for a complete storage system – hardware, software, storage, installation, and maintenance – is based on a per-terabyte per-year basis, with rates decreasing as volumes increase. For CIOs implementing chargeback models, or Service Providers looking to align procurement with market demand, Actifio’s utility pricing model delivers simplicity, flexibility, and predictability. Customers who wish to purchase the hardware and services through traditional means will still have that option.
Easy to deploy: Wizard Slashes Setup Time Up To 80 Percent
The 5.1 version of Actifio’s revolutionary copy data storage system also includes new configuration wizards that slash deployment cycles by as much as 80% over its last generation models.
Easy to use: New Software Functionality
Actifio is also introducing version 5.1 of its software, which includes several new features in the areas of data governance, business resilience, and service management. As enterprise environments put a greater focus on security and control of application data, Actifio has ramped-up its data governance features to include SLA-based data integrity validation; enhanced SLA compliance reporting; user/role-based auditing; LDAP and Active Directory integration; and automated disk-to tape enhancements directly integrated into Actifio’s SLA Lifecycle Manager for compliance-oriented, long-term retention.
The company has expanded the near-instant data access capabilities of its copy data storage platform with three new capabilities:
· Bare Metal Restore to allow for rapid recovery and rebuild of Windows and Linux servers, including to dissimilar hardware
· Test Failover to allow for non-disruptive disaster recovery tests as often as needed
· FailBack and SyncBack help to resume normal operations after a disaster by only moving uniquely changed application data from the disaster recovery site back to the primary site, once it’s ready to resume operations
Service providers around the globe have embraced Actifio as a strategic technology to accelerate new service introduction, deliver new functionality and customer satisfaction, and improve their business margins. Actifio 5.1 continues to advance service management functionality by addressing operations and delivery needs with enhanced system monitoring, alert correlation and processing, auto-updates, VPN access enhancements, and improved integrated reporting.
Leading storage analyst firm, ESG has independently validated that Actifio 5.1 can provide almost 300 percent IT efficiency savings over the competition, and a 400 percent better annual total cost of ownership (TCO) than alternative storage solutions.
“In a world that moves faster than ever, enterprises faces what we call ‘The Agility Imperative,’” said Actifio Founder & CEO Ash Ashutosh. “Actifio was designed from the start to free businesses from the undue burden of wildly redundant copy data, free IT executives from the complex tangle of data protection and availability applications consuming more and more of their IT budgets, and free IT managers from the stress of unmet SLA’s and recovery time objectives impossible to deliver with 20th century technology. These enhancements take us further down that path, making radically simple copy data storage easier to buy, deploy, and love than ever before.”
Real World Impact: What Customers are Saying
“We deployed the 100T and within fifteen minutes Actifio was configured and online. An hour later it was customized to our environment, backing up, deduplicating and replicating to our DR facility 3000 miles away,” said Daniel Acosta, IT Director, MC Assembly. “If something goes wrong, now I just go back in time and mount the snapshot directly from Actifio. To our users it looks like a server reboot, to us it’s the ultimate peace of mind.”
“Technology is an invaluable learning tool here at the university, which means that I need to plan for maximum uptime and availability. In the past this meant frequent data protection and business resiliency testing that required planning, application downtime and costly excess infrastructure which ultimately impacted our users,” said Rich Siedzik, Sr. IT Director, Bryant University. “That was before Actifio where we now have the ability to run Failover Test non-disruptively as often as needed. And if there’s a site failure, I can easily and automatically sync back our unique data.”