Actifio
Actifio announced this week results of its implementation with the City of South Portland, Maine. Among the primary business drivers for installing Actifio’s Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform was the city’s need to reduce the cost and complexity of managing the “copy data” being created by the many siloed business systems making redundant copies of application data being generated in their production environment. Within a few short weeks of implementation, the city government’s IT team was able to completely eliminate its backup software and associated backup and restore windows, while implementing data replication for disaster recovery. This enabled the city to solve three data management challenges with a single turnkey solution.
A major New England city, South Portland has become a center for retail and industry in the region, with its working waterfront on Portland Harbor and close proximity to air, marine and highway transportation hubs. Everything that happens within city government – including finance, public works, police and fire, library and bus system – is supported by its IT department. While the production data created by the applications supporting these essential civic functions was growing steadily, the copy data produced by siloed systems was the root cause of the city’s exponential data growth.
The city’s systems – including backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, and test and development – relied on multiple point tools from multiple vendors across several functions. Each required its own copy of production data, separate licensing fees and annual software maintenance costs, and took time for the IT staff to learn and continuously manage. Despite the time and money invested in this patchwork of solutions, it presented ongoing challenges to meet backup/restore windows and did not meet the needs of South Portland’s highly virtualized IT environment.
“If there’s a problem with a server or application, I don’t try to fix it any more. I actually delete the virtual machine disk, instantly recover from Actifio’s PAS platform and I can have a new server up and running in less than 15 minutes,” said Shawn Pennington, director of IT, City of South Portland. “It’s that easy with Actifio. Rebuilding the server is now faster than trying to download tools to clean up the box.”
By simplifying data management with Actifio and enabling the IT team to recover any type of data instantly, the city also saves time and money associated with meeting Freedom of Information Act requests. Under the law, anyone can request information on any topic and the city must be able to recover the documents associated with that request.
“Actifio is like an Enterprise IT time machine for my applications, bringing the flexibility we need to meet federal requirements in any situation,” added Pennington. “We can instantly recover information from any point in time – not only the last version of a document, but versions of a document throughout its life.”
Actifio addresses protection and availability requirements in physical, virtual or hybrid IT environments. By connecting directly with South Portland’s virtual data center, Actifio provides the flexibility to take advantage of the tools and benefits that a virtualized infrastructure provides. Additionally, by shrinking multiple copies of data into a single virtualized platform and applying DeDup Async replication technology, Actifio dramatically reduces storage costs and network bandwidth requirements for the city’s network.
“Federal, state and local governments are under constant pressure to work more efficiently with a portfolio of data management applications making their IT operations overly complex,” said Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio. “By eliminating expensive and inflexible data management tools with Actifio’s PAS Platform, all levels of government can reduce the cost and complexity of their IT infrastructure to better serve the public.”
