WALTHAM, Mass. & FORT WORTH, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Actifio, the radically simple copy data storage company, today announced that its Copy Data Storage platform has been implemented by Texas Wesleyan University, a leading private liberal arts college in Fort Worth, TX. By replacing point backup tools and tape with Actifio, Texas Wesleyan reduced recovery time service level agreements from three-to-five days to five hours – an 18-fold faster recovery. This achievement was matched by the return-on-investment yielded by the Actifio solution with Texas Wesleyan saving an estimated $2.5M in remote disaster recovery site costs as well as eliminating five-figure annual tape operations and connectivity costs.
Founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church and serving 2,800 students and faculty, Texas Wesleyan was one of the first schools in Texas to virtualize its environment. In doing so, the university sought a faster, more efficient approach to data management and backup – one that would be a departure from its prior complex backup tool which copied to tape. The older backup tool required considerable expertise and engineering to set up and administer yet the backups and recoveries were not consistent and frequently took longer than expected.
Working with IT services partner Mainline Information Systems, Texas Wesleyan sought a new approach to backup that would be easy to administer as well as more consistent and reliable while enhancing off-site disaster recovery capabilities. They also wanted to pay for a better backup solution as a monthly operating expense rather than a capital expense. This search led them to Actifio according to Kendra Ketchum, director of infrastructure at Texas Wesleyan.
“It was an easy choice. Once we found Actifio, we didn’t renew the cost of our prior backup tool and we eliminated the high five figure annual tape cost of operations. We are fortunate that our CIO gives us the freedom to try new products and to be innovative, something that can be difficult to find at larger state universities,” she said.
After implementing the Actifio solution, Texas Wesleyan realized immediate impactful benefits. First, the backup success rate is now close to 100 percent compared to an overall success rate of 70% with the previous solution. And, they can easily validate backups and test recoveries too. The recovery success rate is now 100%, up from 90% previously. Another key benefit is that Texas Wesleyan doesn’t have to spend the $2.5+ million required to build its own remote site for disaster recovery. Instead, the school gets backup and disaster recovery services at a fraction of the cost, spread out as an operating expense – a flat monthly subscription fee – over five years. Lastly, the school saved an additional $54,000 annually in connectivity costs thanks to the deduplication and compression power of Actifio, which reduced their data size by 90%.
Actifio Copy Data Storage is optimized for managing copies of data, eliminating redundant silos of infrastructure and data management applications. By virtualizing the management and retention of data, Actifio transforms the need for multiple data silos and point tools deployed for backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, compliance, analytics, and test and development into one, SLA-driven, virtualized storage system.
“We are delighted that Texas Wesleyan had such extraordinary experience with our Copy Data Storage platform,” said Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh. “The IT team feels empowered by this backup breakthrough and they now have 30% more time to spend on strategic IT projects that are more meaningful to the school – rather than troubleshooting faulty backup and recovery solutions. This is a win/win for the entire Texas Wesleyan community.”
About Actifio
Actifio is radically simple copy data management. Our Copy Data Storage platform is a complete storage system, a package of proprietary software and enterprise-grade hardware that enables customers to identify data from any production application; capture it according to an SLA they can define in just a few clicks; and manage it over it’s entire lifecycle in a dramatically more bandwidth, labor, and storage footprint efficient way than is possible with traditional, siloed systems. Virtual copies of data protected by Actifio are available to production systems – instantly – for a host of enterprise use cases including Data Protection, Business Continuity, Dev/Test, Data Insights, and Active Archive.
Actifio is headquartered just outside Boston, Massachusetts, with customers in over 22 countries and offices around the world. For more information, please visit http://www.actifio.com or email info@actifio.com.
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