Actifio Gets Easier To Buy, Approve, Deploy and Use

Leader in Copy Data Storage Announces New Product Family, Pricing Options, Deployment Tools, and Software Functionality

WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Actifio™, the radically simple copy data storage company, today announced significant product and service enhancements designed to make managing copy data – and transforming the underlying economics of enterprise storage – even easier. 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.

“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”

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 20^th 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."

Analysts’ Take: Data Explosion and the Actifio Solution

Taneja

“For a long time the storage industry has focused heavily on primary production storage, not realizing that the cost of “copy” storage has been growing exponentially to the point where it costs more than primary storage. Moreover, it certainly is a pain to manage and grow. Actifio’s microscopic focus on relieving pressure on this “copy” storage (which, by the way, includes backup, restore, snapshots, replication and more) may not appear so but it is indeed a paradigm shift. With the new release, Actifio has simplified the delivery for all customers and enhanced its appeal for service providers.”

Gartner

“The challenges associated with large volumes of unmanaged data have historically focused on cost and risk. But a larger challenge is that no one department has end-to-end responsibility for the data,” said Shelia Childs, Managing VP, Gartner, and Alan Dayley, Research Director, Gartner, in a report titled, “Use These Unstructured Data Management Best Practices to Manage Based on the Time Value of Data,” published November 16, 2012. The report continues: “Progressive organizations are realizing that information can give the business a competitive edge if that information is well-managed and accessible in a way that optimizes its usefulness. The business inherently realizes that it cares more about some data than other data, and should fine-tune its applications and environment to address information costs, risks and, especially, value.”

IDC

“Copy data is everywhere - it could start off with multiple copies of the same file, move on to multiple copies of the volume, application data, backups, test/dev, online copies for operational and disaster recovery...the list goes on,“ said Ashish Nadkarni, IDC Storage Research Director. “In fact in a recent IDC study, we found that nearly 75% of all data generated is copy data. Which means only 25% of all data generated is unique - everything else is copy data. That is a staggering number and exposes the tip of the iceberg of how serious this problem really is.”

Forrester Research, Inc.

“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,” wrote report author Rachel Dines, Forrester Research Senior Analyst, Serving Infrastructure & Operations in a November, 2010 report titled "Market Overview: Enterprise-Class Backup And Recovery Software."

About Actifio

Actifio is radically simple copy data management. Our copy data storage platform lets businesses recover anything instantly, for up to 90 percent less. 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 http://www.actifio.com or email [e-mail].

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