News Article
Actifio updates Copy Data storage platform with pay-as-you-grow pricing
January 29, 2013
Actifio, a vendor specialising in storage and management of copy data in an enterprise environment, has unveiled an enhanced version of its software platform along with new ready-packaged configurations and a utility pricing option to let customers pay as they grow.
A relatively new firm, Actifio offers customers a storage platform capable of providing backup, snapshot and disaster recovery functions for any application using their production storage environment.
It claims to be able to do this at a cost 90 percent lower than operating traditional siloed systems for these functions, by virtualising it all into a dedicated appliance that can let customers recover any data almost instantly.
“Organisations are having to spend more and more of their IT budget storing copies of stuff rather than the data itself. Every time you deploy a new application or do something for compliance purposes, you have to make and store redundant copies for the lifecycle of that application, and the volumes are just ballooning,” Actifio marketing director Andrew Gilman told V3.
“To address that we’ve virtualised data management into a new type of storage that is just optimised to manage copies of data, so you can eliminate backup software altogether.”
Now, Actifio is making it easier for customers to acquire and deploy its platform, as well as rolling out version 5.1 with capabilities such as service level agreement compliance reporting and automatic disaster recovery testing.
To help with purchasing, Actifio is now offering both capital expenditure (capex) and operational expenditure (opex) pricing, the latter enabling customers to consume the platform as a service, according to Gilman.
“We believe this is where the market is heading for enterprise storage and we’re leading the way by giving users the option to choose what works best for them,” he said.
Actifio is now offering configurations from 15TB up to 100TB in its turnkey 100T product line, which can be combined to scale up to two petabytes. A separate Enterprise Gateway version is available for organisations looking to use their own storage infrastructure, whereas the 100T line includes all the hardware, software and storage.
Actifio 5.1 enhancements fit into three major categories: data governance; automation; and service management.
For data governance, SLA compliance reporting enables visibility of who is restoring what data and which users, while the new version also supports single sign-on integration via LDAP and Active Directory.
Key new automation capabilities address failover and failback testing for customers.
“At any time during the day we can run non-destructive recovery test, without using any additional storage thanks to our virtual copying capabilities. We’ve also automated the process of failing back from the disaster recovery site to the production site. Because we maintain and store only changed blocks, we can send those back to the main site without using a tremendous amount of bandwidth,” Gilman explained.
For service providers using Actifio, version 5.1 provides more scalable monitoring and management of the system, with automated updates and consolidated views of the status across their entire user base.
In addition, a new wizard-based deployment tool greatly speeds installation, according to Actifio.
The new configurations are available immediately, while the Actifio 5.1 software is due for release in March. Customers with a maintenance contract will get the upgrade at no extra cost, and the firm can even deploy the software remotely, according to Gilman.
Pricing for Actifio depends on the volume of data being managed, but a typical figure is in the region of $200,000.