Actifio 6.0 Delivers Powerful New Enterprise Information Management Platform

Latest platform release expands support of business resiliency applications, adds application development & testing workflows, cloud service enhancements, enterprise mobility

WALTHAM, Mass. – August 19, 2013 — Actifio™, the radically simple copy data storage company, today announced a significant product release expanding the scope of Actifio as a strategic, application-defined copy data management platform. New features in Actifio 6.0 allow companies to manage data in ways that go beyond business resiliency applications – classic backup and business continuity use cases – to manage enterprise data access in ways that dramatically enhance business agility. The initial focus of these features is on the ability to instantly provision application data for self-service development and testing. In addition, Actifio 6.0 is optimized for cloud service providers to dramatically accelerate service introduction with less infrastructure and cost.

Highlights of the release include:

Automated application development workflows for better apps, 300% faster
Accelerated service introduction for Cloud Providers with 90% less infrastructure
Anywhere access with mobile management apps for real-time IT monitoring
Advanced SAP, Microsoft Exchange, SQL, HP-UX, AIX, IBM iSeries and Oracle Solaris Integrations

Actifio now protects 1000’s of enterprise applications, representing 396 petabytes for over 250 users in 22 countries around the world, making it the fastest growing storage company from inception, ever.The power of Actifio’s award winning Copy Data Storage platform lies in its ability to capture data from applications across the enterprise, minimize the movement of the data across the network, and optimize its storage in such a way that can reduce the overall cost of data management by up to 90%. Global CIO’s recognize the Actifio’s broad applicability beyond backup and business continuity and are selecting Actifio as a platform for building better apps faster. In addition, cloud service providers, which last quarter represented over 50% of Actifio’s bookings for the first time, recognize that the platform transforms the economics of their service delivery by allowing them to build and deliver more compelling cloud-based services in ways that are both faster and more capital efficient than ever before.

Better Apps Faster

Demand for new apps is increasing and the top priority is to develop new apps faster. Analysts estimate that as many as 2,000 mobile apps are released daily. According to IDC, the top reason for the growth of redundant copies of data, or copy data, are increased number of apps and more copies per app created. In fact, 41 percent of Actifio customers stated the biggest copy data challenge is that development and test environments lack resources to keep up with new app demands, resulting in delays in provisioning production and database images for dev, test and quality assurance. (Source: TechValidate. TVID: D54-F93-B45)

Actifio 6.0 gives enterprises advanced integration between their infrastructure, enterprise apps and underlying databases for application-aware data management, self-service provisioning for development, on-demand test data creation for user acceptance and full app lifecycle protection. Enterprises can reuse the single, golden copy provided by Actifio to work from instantly refreshable, application consistent data, greatly accelerating development and testing. This is achieved through several new capabilities:

On-demand, self-service app development – New role-based controls enable self-service provisioning of test instances, and LiveClone^TM and LiveClone^TMLayers provide space-efficient, live-updated independent virtual copies of data.
Dev/Test workflows with consumer-grade simplicity – User-defined scheduled processing of copy data to streamline workflows for test & development, ETL, reporting, analytics and other business agility oriented processes.

“Copy data management is about way more than making backup more efficient,” said Ash Ashutosh, Actifio founder and CEO. “Once a customer’s protected their application data with Actifio, they can not only recover it, they can leverage it in ways that make the business more agile. With Actifio 6.0, we’re introducing new workflow tools and specialized features to transform the way DBA’s get their hands on the data they need to develop new applications, for example. And over the coming months you’ll see us refine and integrate similar features, to better support the use cases our customers are showing us every day.”

Better Clouds Faster

Cloud service providers are faced with a legacy deployment model that creates a business challenge. These include siloed infrastructures that create asset utilization challenges, heterogeneous environments that are complex and labor intensive, and high costs for delivering differentiated service levels and incremental services. The new release of Actifio for service providers delivers a “business-in-a-box” that transforms these underlying economics, which completes phase 2 of our cloud enablement program. This release also unites our Cloud Partner and Channel partner programs to be able to work together, globally in solving our users common copy data challenges.

New capabilities in Actifio 6.0 allow Cloud Service Providers to rapidly launch new services; including DevOps and dev/test services, backup/recovery and archive-as-a-service from a single platform. Specifically, new Actifio 6.0 features deliver on the following key service provider functional requirements:

Multi-tenancy – Secure separation of tenants with custom-scoped SLAs, Resources, replication types and more
On-Boarding – Data seeding, non-disruptive application/data migration, rich API for portal integration
Billing/Reporting – Easy integration with existing billing systems through RESTful API, PostgreSQL queries; virtual reporting appliance included
Security – Role-based access controls, encryption in flight, optional encryption at rest, and full audit logging

“We’re thrilled with the success our cloud service provider partners are having with their Actifio-based offerings,” said Actifio president Jim Sullivan. “Actifio 6.0 will provide them with the ability to deploy and commercialize market-differentiated offerings more quickly, while maintaining the simplicity of operations and capital efficiency that have become our hallmark.”

Deeper Business Resiliency

Actifio 6.0 delivers deeper application support across major enterprise platforms, including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, SAP, Oracle, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and IBM iSeries. Actifio’s advanced integration now covers the majority of all enterprise applications providing deeper data protection and business continuity across the board.

“Actifio Anywhere”

In line with the growing trend towards the “consumerization” of enterprise IT, Actifio 6.0 now offers a powerful mobile management suite for iOS devices that provides CIOs and IT administrators with real-time monitoring of their business SLAs wherever they are.

Actifio 6.0 is expected to be available as a software upgrade for the Actifio copy data storage platform during the 4^th quarter. Please note that this information is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality.

Supporting Quotes:

“Organizations around the world are now rapidly adopting copy data management solutions to solve many symptoms of the $44Billion copy data explosion.” Said IDC Research Director, Ashish Nadkarni, “In the long term, the effective use of copy data management provides more efficient business resiliency and more agile and efficient application development, testing, and DevOps. Already on their 6.0 release, Actifio is extending their lead in this exciting new market.”

“As the CIO responsible for meeting application SLA requirements of our sensitive financial data, I can sleep better at night knowing Actifio is my trusted platform for backup and recovery,” Said Erik Dubovik, CIO Audax Group, “It’s exciting to see the platform extension in 6.0 which opens up brand new use opportunities for our team to leverage and helps me do more with less while getting more out of my original investment.”

“ESG continually sees IT organizations of all sizes prioritizing Improving Backup/Recovery and BC/DR capabilities, so it is obvious that folks are looking for fresh ways to solve old problems,” said Jason Buffington, Senior Data Protection Analyst at ESG. “And that is what Actifio is: a fresh approach to addressing the age-old problem of creating too many copies of data, under the admirable intent of data protection. With its 6.0 release, Actifio is looking to build on its initial successes with a broader range of protection scenarios being powered by its platform.”

“IT organizations are increasingly adopting DevOps. Service providers, especially those with managed hosting and cloud-related infrastructure services, need to adapt their processes and tools accordingly.” noted Gartner Research VP, Lydia Leong, “Service providers must learn to support agile operations. This includes process and tools for continuous integration and continuous deployment of customer applications, DevOps configuration management approaches and the operations approaches made possible by programmatic access to infrastructure.”*

“Actifio solves the issue of having to rely on primary storage to rehydrate any backup data for either recovery or test / dev purposes. The solution also breaks down the perception that backup / restore is an additional burden since now you can use the same data for other purposes.” – Application Manger, Leading Educational Institution (Source: TechValidate. TVID: 5DE-0F1-154)

“Enterprises face growing challenges in bridging disparate sources of data to fuel analytics, predictive analytics, real-time insights, and application development. The data explosion is also exacerbating integration, security, performance, quality, and availability issues. Business users need reliable information fast (in real time) to make business decisions, while IT needs to lower costs, minimize complexity, and improve operational efficiency.”**

“We were simply ready for a single solution that could modernize data management and DevOps requirements – from backup to disaster recovery and business continuity as well as the day-to-day access of data for application testing within seconds.” Said Bryon Bua, Vice President and Manager of Enterprise Technology, Admirals Bank. “Actifio fulfilled all of those requirements for us with a single solution while also saving us $750,000 in disk costs over five years and we’re excited to see the new 6.0 features that will help our organization become even more agile.”

*Gartner: Managed Service Providers Must Adapt to the Needs of DevOps-Oriented Customers by Research VP Lydia Leong, July 2013

** Stated the August, 2013 Forrester Research, Inc. report “Information Fabric 3.0

About Actifio

Actifio is radically simple copy data management. Our copy data storage platform allows enterprises to access anything, instantly. Actifio eliminates siloed data protection applications, virtualizing data management to deliver an application-centric, SLA-driven solution that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure. Actifio has helped liberate IT organizations and service providers of all sizes from vendor lock-in and the management challenges associated with exploding data growth. Actifio is headquartered in Waltham, Mass., with offices around the world. For more information, please visit https://www.actifio.com/ or email info@actifio.com.

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