Actifio claims it is the 'fastest growing enterprise storage firm' – ever

Actifio, a privately held storage startup founded in 2008, is crowing like a chanticleer that business was booming last year for its funky Copy Data Storage arrays. Probably in the hopes of either raking in more venture funding or setting itself up to go public at some point in the future. Copy Data Storage is the brain child …

[Nate Amsden]

any first hand accounts?

Actifio cold called me I think back in September and I sat through one of their webex-type presentations. I didn't see anything that would really benefit me, though I keep seeing the employees write about the company in my linkedin feeds. I'd be curious to know what sorts of storage system(s) people are using Actifio with and what specific use cases they are using it for.

Is this mainly used for storage systems that don't have good snapshot abilities? I have one friend who works at a really large shop who told me once their policy is to not to use snapshots because they don't have a good way to do charge back, so everything is full copies(and they use really high end tier 1 storage - many PBs worth).

Maybe it's just me but I struggled to find anything exciting in that presentation I sat through. I'm sure it has it's uses but I think back to the companies I have worked at including the present one and could not think of a time when I think what I thought was being presented to me would of been a killer app in any way shape or form.

For me I am typically I/O bound, which means more spindles (I don't buy into the sub LUN auto tiering, though wouldn't mind SSD-accelerated WRITE caching - presently my workload is 92% write). more spindles means more space. more space means I can store more copies of data(if I need) because typically those copies consume very little(if any) I/O. I get a bunch of extra space from the spindles that I'm using for performance so it all sort of balances out..

Most of the copies of my data are MySQL slave databases as well - something which I don't think Actifio would have any impact on since each one is on it's own LUN replicating in real time. Aside from backups (again most of which are MySQL) - backups are handled by a basic dedupe system, nothing fancy.

I'm probably missing something here..wouldn't be the first time!

[frank ly]

"crowing like a chanticleer "

That should be 'crowing like Chanticleer', i.e. the name of a character, the rooster/cockerel in The Canterbury Tales.