Texas Wesleyan University Customer of Actifio

Actifio, Inc. announced that its Copy storage platform has been implemented by Texas Wesleyan University, a private liberal arts college in Fort Worth, TX.

By replacing point backup tools and tape with Actifio, TX Wesleyan reduced recovery time SLAs 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 $2.5 million in remote DR 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, TX 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 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, Inc., TX Wesleyan sought a new approach to backup that would be easy to administer as well as more consistent and reliable while enhancing off-site DR 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 solution, TX Wesleyan realized impactful benefits. First, the backup success rate is now close to 100% compared to an overall success rate of 70% with the previous solution. And, they can 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 DR. Instead, the school gets backup and DR 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%.

Copy 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, DR, BC, 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 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.“