eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
The data storage industry has added yet another acronym to its already large set of lettered shortcuts: PAS. But it may well be an important one to learn.
PAS stands for Protection and Availability Storage, as coined by 3-year-old storage startup Actifio. On Oct. 3 the company introduced PAS, which it contends is the industry’s first storage system truly optimized to manage copies of production data and eliminate redundant silos of IT infrastructure and data management applications.
This goes much further than deduplication and data compression. Actifio, whose catchphrase is “Un-Silo Data with a Pipeline to Freedom,” takes deduplicated, compressed data a step further: It creates just-in-time copies of data when it’s needed, instead of storing everything in arrays or in the cloud.
“Companies spend most of their storage budget managing copies of data they may never use again,” Actifio founder and CEO Ash Ashutosh told eWEEK. “How much more efficient would it be if they just kept one copy of everything, and it was always safe, protected and available? No backup copies would ever be needed. That’s essentially what Actifio does.”
Two Categories of Enterprise Data: Production and Copy
Enterprise data can be classified into two categories: production data, representing the real-time data created and used by business applications; and copy data, comprising copies of production data created for data protection, information sharing, analysis, development or compliance.
Key features of Actifio PAS, as described by Ashutosh, include the following:
- Eliminates backup windows and delivers a radically simple, application-centric solution that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure, resulting in 10X reduction in costs.
- By virtualizing the management and retention of data, Actifio transforms multiple silos of infrastructure and point tools traditionally deployed for backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, compliance, analytics and test/development into one, service level-driven, virtualized protection and availability storage device.
- Reduces overall storage costs by an estimated 90 percent and network utilization by 70 percent.
Actifio PAS is built on its own patented Virtual Data Pipeline IT to virtualize management of copies of production data, eliminating all redundancies and repurposing the unique data for multiple data management applications, Ashutosh said.
This is a distributed object file system that virtualizes the core primitives of data management-copy, store, move and restore-and enables instant creation of virtual copies of point-in-time data from the collection of unique blocks of data, he said.
“With Actifio, users can efficiently manage all copies of production data across virtual, physical and cloud IT infrastructure for on-premises, hosted, hybrid or SaaS deployments of applications,” Ashutosh said.
The newly freed-from-beta Actifio is available now. Go here for more information.