Actifio Boosts Storage Efficiency, Capacity

Data protection specialist Actifio launched Tuesday the next version of its protection and availability software that helps administrators deduplicate, back up, snapshot, and replicate their data and save storage capacity as they do it.

The Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) reduces the amount of "copy" data that is created for snapshots, backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity; testing and development; and analytics to one set of production data, which is then dealt out virtually to applications that need it. Changes to production data are captured only once, deduplicated, and only the unique data is stored and moved to the backup, snapshot, or other application.

Managed from a single interface, PAS allows IT administrators to create service level agreements (SLAs) that dictate how often applications and data are backed up, snapshotted, and replicated for disaster recovery and business continuity. IT can select an application and discover the virtual machines, host computers, and operating systems the application is connected to and bind them all to the SLA. When the administrator wants to recover data, he/she selects the application, sets a restore point from which the data will be recovered from, and selects the restore location.

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PAS 5.0 has been enhanced for the service provider market with the addition of multi-tenancy and increased network optimization. The software is now able to handle a 200% capacity increase over previous versions and two times the throughput. It now supports as much as 127 TB and allows faster uploading of data to remote applications via portable hard drives or USB-based storage. Enhancements to PAS 5.0 also include new reporting capabilities and improved workflows, as well as an SLA for Oracle, which allows database cloning to decrease test and development expenses.

The new release of PAS also includes a new feature called DeDup Async, a protocol that combines asynchronous replication with deduplication to improve network bandwidth. It also now supports file system data on Windows and Linux networks running on direct-attached storage, network-attached storage (NAS), or a storage area network (SAN).

Customers of Actifio include Boston University Medical Campus, Navisite, and the City of South Portland. Actifio was founded in 2009 by CEO Ash Ashutosh, formerly of HP. The company is funded for $58.5 million by Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Ventures, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Advanced Technology Ventures.

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