Actifio has emerged from stealth mode with a unified suite of software tools for data protection, disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC). The company’s CEO, Ash Ashutosh, was the brains behind AppIQ, a storage management software company acquired by HP in 2005. In this interview with sister site InfoStor, Ashutosh explains how Actifio is trying to do for data management what virtualization technologies did for servers.
“Actifio came out of stealth mode today and introduced a set of products under the umbrella term “data management virtualization” (DMV): Actifio DP (data protection), Actifio DR (disaster recovery) and Actifio BC (business continuity).
“According to Actifio president and CEO Ash Ashutosh, the company’s goal is to simplify the overall data management process with a unified suite of software. “The paradigm we’re applying to data management is analogous to what virtualization did to servers,” says Ashutosh.
“Compared to buying, deploying and maintaining separate silos of data protection point products from multiple vendors, the company claims to be able to reduce data management costs by as much as 90%. However, list pricing starts at $200,000 for a configuration with Actifio DP that can manage 5TB of data. The software is packaged in x86 appliances that can scale to eight servers per cluster.
“Ashutosh says that the trends leading up to the DMV concept were server virtualization (which created storage bottlenecks), backup to disk, and the commoditization of storage. Actifio’s appliances and software virtualize the underlying storage technology and can be used with any vendor’s storage devices. In effect, data management is de-coupled from the underlying storage.
“At the heart of Actifio’s technology is a VirtualData Pipeline, which integrates capacity optimization, data deduplication, compression, encryption and network optimization, and virtualizes the traditional copy-store-move-restore operations. The company claims zero-backup windows, with the VDP enabling creation of virtual copies of data with zero-footprint of storage.”
Read the Full “Actifio Introduces Data Management Virtualization” Story at InfoStor.
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