Boston University Medical Campus deploys Actifio PAS platform

Actifio™, the Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform company, today announced results of its deployment at Boston University Medical Campus (BUMC) where it helped to gain control over its diverse, heterogeneous IT infrastructure. By virtualizing the management and retention of data, Actifio PAS provides BUMC with a simple, flexible and reliable solution capable of supporting backup and recovery requirements in any physical, virtual or hybrid IT environment.

“There's no way to predict what type of equipment a lab might purchase a week or a month from now, or what sorts of data will be generated and need to be stored and managed. However, we still need to support whatever equipment they choose”

Unlike most corporate environments where a central IT department can dictate software, hardware, operating systems and other standards, academic research requires flexibility that allows each individual laboratory to purchase and implement its own technology. As labs are awarded grants for new research, they quickly move to new projects and purchase new equipment to support their work. As a result, protecting previously generated data, and related copies of that data for backup and disaster recovery efforts, in countless different formats and standards becomes a burdensome task.

"There's no way to predict what type of equipment a lab might purchase a week or a month from now, or what sorts of data will be generated and need to be stored and managed. However, we still need to support whatever equipment they choose," said Dr. John Meyers, assistant professor of medicine and director of technology at BU School of Medicine's Department of Medicine. "The traditional enterprise-class data backup and recovery solutions we considered were often really good at one thing, but weren't able to scale across our diverse and increasingly complex infrastructure. Actifio, with its innovative use of virtualization technology, easy-to-use interface, and ability to streamline data management without dragging down bandwidth, was the only viable solution."

With Actifio PAS, BU Medical Campus found a single product able to support all of its equipment, from different types of stand-alone legacy servers including Windows and Sun Solaris machines, to new virtual servers. Before Actifio, the only way BUMC could backup data was by using individual tape solutions on a scattered collection of servers and storage solutions that were housed in multiple labs and managed by many different people. Replication wasn't an option because it requires an identical cluster of hardware from the same vendor in another building or campus, which is costly and taxing on network bandwidth. As a result, when the Medical Campus moved to consolidate its diverse infrastructure into a central location that includes legacy servers and new virtual servers assigned to individual labs, Actifio PAS became a critical component of its modern data center management strategy and enabled it to eliminate traditional backup software.

"IT organizations within world-class academic and research-based institutions such as BU Medical Campus struggle every day to store large amounts of data and to effectively manage, protect and analyze it," said Ash Ashutosh, CEO, Actifio. "We built the PAS Platform to be a flexible solution that could easily scale with our customers' data management and storage needs, a perfect fit for the Medical Campus. We look forward to expanding the scope of our relationship and evolving to help address the unique IT challenges scientists face when working to make discoveries in the life sciences."

By virtualizing the storage and management of data, Actifio PAS minimizes storage space and network bandwidth. In addition, Actifio only requires users to manage two core concepts- applications and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Users simply select an application and set an SLA tailored to its specific needs. For example, systems that are accessed infrequently and exist to house legacy data can be set to backup once per day or once per month. On the other hand, critical systems that change more rapidly can have hourly snapshots and frequent backups.