Startup claims massive cost savings in backup and disaster recovery
Actifio offers data management virtualisation
By Maxwell Cooter | Techworld | Published: 18:43, 18 August 2010
A start-up claims to have cracked one of the problems faced by modern enterprises - the complexity of backup systems and the time taken to copy data.
Actifio has developed a technology that enables customers to improve the efficiency of its distaster recovery, backup and business continuity. And given the way that most vendors are adopting virtualisation these days, it's no surprise to hear that the Actifio approach is known as data management virtualisation.
The difficulty faced by enterprises is that they need to deploy a multitude of tools to manage the different processes, leading to a costly and time-wasting operation. The Actifio approach is based on a technology called VirtualData Pipeline that tranforms the individual silos to a single process, by decoupling the management of the data from where it is stored.
The Actifio software is able to control the way that an enterprise stores, copies, moves and restores the data that applications generate, the company said. The company claims that cost savings of up to 80 percent can be made as well as simplifying the backup approach quite considerably and bringing archiving times down from hours to minutes.
"We're offering something dramatically simpler and more importantly at lower cost," said Ash Ashutosh, co-founder and CEO of Actifio. "The current process is an artefact of history. Over 25 years or so, enterprises have built layer upon layer and added the tools to support those layers. It's the complexity of these tools that we have to deal with."
He said that one of the key features of the technology was that it allowed customers to work with products from any storage vendor, believing that its customer would appreciate the flexibilty.
The Actifio technology comes in three versions: one for backup; one for disaster recovery and one for business continuity. Ashutosh said that costing would be based on application data being handled but said that a typical baseline price would be about $200,000.
He said that the product would be typically aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises and was already available. There is no UK reseller as yet but Ashutosh said that the company was looking to acquire one in the future.
