During the May 15, 2012, Peer Incite call, John Meyers, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Medicine and Director of Technology for the Department of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, discussed the benefits of creating a consolidated backup and archive repository.
Rather than maintaining different solutions for backup and archive, the Department of Medicine serves both backup/restore requirements and archive access requirements from a common, de-duplicated copy-data pool. The Department of Medicine selected this approach, available from Actifio, because it eliminated the multiple, redundant or similar copies of data that would otherwise proliferate across the Department's two data centers.
Dr. Meyers estimates that he has saved $1 Million in storage expense and achieved an 85% reduction in storage requirements for backup and archive by eliminating copies of data that would otherwise be maintained on his primary storage: Isilon from EMC and 3PAR from HP. Cost savings were not the only benefit, however, as he has demonstrated the ability to very rapidly restore volumes and files from the consolidated pool.
It is not uncommon for organizations to keep significant numbers of copies of production data to serve not only backup, disaster recovery and archive requirements, but also application development, testing, and analytic application requirements. Performance considerations, near term, will act as one constraint on the ability of solutions like Actifio's to reduce all copy data to a single repository for all workloads, all applications, and all users. That said, disruption almost always begins from below, and over time will become a greater and more significant threat to the revenue that leading providers of primary storage derive from controller-based replication software and storage systems that store copies of primary data.
Action Item: It is sufficiently early in the technology adoption life cycle that, beyond the account manager and territory-manager level, today's leading storage systems suppliers will feel little near-term impact from the adoption of solutions such as Actifio's. That said, the time is now for product managers to elevate the importance of product requirements for managing copy data and to give customers visibility to capabilities already in the product development roadmap that will reduce volume and file copies and resulting storage hardware requirements. Pricing actions and a responsive deal desk will not be sufficient to compete against a starting point that delivers an 85% reduction in copy-data storage requirements.
Footnotes: During the call, Dr. Meyers disclosed that, after selecting and implementing the Actifio solution, he was retained as an external advisor to the company and has a financial interest in Actifio.