Boston University Medical Campus Cures Backup Software Pain

Actifio, Inc., the Protection
and Availability Storage (PAS) platform company, 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 solution capable of supporting backup and
recovery requirements in any physical, virtual or hybrid IT environment.

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 DR 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 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.

Video of Dr. Meyers talking about his Actifio Solution