Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Firm Apotex Prescribes Actifio

Actifio, Inc. has announced details of how its platform has sped database recovery times by 96% and cut storage costs by 60% at Apotex, Inc., the largest Canadian-owned generic pharmaceutical company.

The seventh-largest generic pharmaceutical company with estimated sales of approximately $2 billion, Apotex produces high-quality, affordable generic pharmaceutical medicines for patients with a production of 25 billion doses per year.

As Apotex’s business continued to grow, the organization needed to prioritize its IT as the centerpiece of its financial forecasting, analytics and manufacturing, as well as its new medicine development. Each of these areas required the use of large databases that needed to be up and running or recovered quickly, but the backups of these databases would take up to half a day to perform, with database refreshing for periodic testing tying up staff and production resources for nearly two to three days.

Apotex scrambled to find a backup alternative that would recover and protect its data in a timely fashion, but many options left too large a time gap. Once the Apotex team discovered Actifio and saw first-hand how the platform cut application recovery time from 12 hours to less than 30 minutes during analytics and DevOps testing, they had found their solution.

Ernesto Nigro, manager of systems operations and architecture, global information systems, Apotex, said: “As our IT organization encountered a number of issues with our backup and recovery functionalities, we needed a solution that would not only improve speeds, but also protect our databases – and Actifio was the perfect fit. In addition to Actifio’s backup, recovery and development capabilities, we found that the copy data virtualization reduced the need for additional storage, reducing our capital expenditures on storage by as much as 60%. Our experience with Actifio has been nothing short of superb but above all else, it gives us peace of mind.“

Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO, Actifio, said: “Apotex set out to find a reliable backup and recovery partner that they could trust to help drive their business initiatives forward, and we are thrilled that they found such a solution in Actifio. With their new backup speeds, reduced storage expenses and staff times and renewed ease of data movement, we look forward to seeing Apotex flourish through the use of our platform.“

Case study