South African owned integrated solutions specialist, Intuate Group has announced the establishment of an official partnership with Massachusetts based, Actifio, a privately held information technology and software company whose radically simple Copy Data Virtualisation platform is designed to make information technology infrastructure more efficient and cost effective by reducing the copies of computer data an organisation must keep.

This partnership brings Intuate Group clients cutting-edge solutions for their data management requirements. Actifio’s system decouples data from infrastructure, enabling dramatic improvements in business resiliency, agility, and access to the cloud. Actifio replaces siloed data management applications, like backup, disaster recovery, and development and test data management with a simple, application-centric, SLA-driven system.

“In essence, the technology lets customers capture data from production applications, manage it more economically, in the most efficient way possible, and use virtual or physical copies of the data whenever and wherever they need them, effectively reducing up to 80 percent of your copy data” says Mark Edwards, director and CTO at Intuate Group.

Since launching its first product in the latter part of 2011, Actifio has experienced rapid growth and has been described by Forbes as history’s fastest growing storage startup. The company has received a number of awards including being named one of “America’s Most Promising Companies” by Forbes in November 2013 and “Product of the Year” by Storage Magazine in the backup hardware category in February 2013.

The Actifio Copy Data Virtualization platform is the industry’s first copy data management solution built to protect both physical and virtual servers. The system is optimised for VMware environments and is directly integrated with VMware vStorage API to virtualise the common data management functions – copy, store, move and restore – into a single storage platform.

Key benefits include:
* Instant data availability from any point in time with zero backup and restore windows;
* Individually defined service level agreements (SLAs) for improved data capture frequency and retention time; and,
* Immediate virtual copies of data, requiring no additional storage footprint to save on data capacity.

“Actifio’s technology is unrivalled,” continues Edwards. “Because of its innovative approach to managing copy data by eliminating multiple copies and radically simplifying data management, it can deliver significant savings to customers through reduced storage requirements, fewer software licenses, and lower management and network costs. At Intuate, we have already devised a deployment methodology where the client’s current backup management system can remain intact while the client adopts the Actifio solution.”

Greg Scorziello, GM EMEA at Actifio, comments, “With Actifio, organisations of all sizes can essentially reverse their big data growth by copying data once and reusing it for multiple applications. By bringing Actifio’s proven virtualised storage solution to their clients, Intuate will further reinforce their trusted advisor status with their clients.”