Actifio is powering new application development and testing services from
Net3 Technologies (N3T), a managed Cloud services provider. N3T’s new Symmetry DevOps™ service builds on its existing
Palmetto Virtual Data Centre (PvDC) Cloud services for data backup and disaster recovery (DR) based on the Actifio Copy Data Virtualisation platform.
Previously, N3T’s data protection and DR services were challenged by overlapping and inefficient legacy hardware and software platforms from multiple vendors, which meant higher costs in licensing and management overhead, and difficulty in responding rapidly to client needs. It was also time consuming for N3T staff needing to perform manual operations across all of these point tools.
Shifting these services to Actifio’s platform replaced the inefficiency of multiple backup and replication tools with one simple, manageable access point. For N3T, this enabled it to free up staff time, improve customer satisfaction with a new self-service portal that integrates with the Actifio Foresight™ API, and allow for increased revenues from expanded service offerings.
“Years ago, we immediately saw that Actifio gave us the capability to offer the data protection services we wanted – that our customers needed,” said DJ Bissinger, founder and principal, N3T. “Over time though, customers started needing access to data faster for application testing and development – to shorten their time to market. With Actifio as our data management platform, we knew we could use its data virtualisation and workflows to build out differentiated test/dev services to meet this customer demand.”
N3T’s Symmetry DevOps service reduces pressure on in-house IT operations staff that usually lack the processes and tools to respond quickly to the demand for rapid application development and rollouts. Using Actifio, N3T is able to cut the time it takes customers to create new development environments with fresh, complete application data from months to days. Plus, N3T can keep those critical applications protected and recoverable in case of disaster, again alleviating the burden of recovery operations on in-house teams.
An example of the power of the N3T Symmetry DevOps service comes from Ortec, Inc. a leading polymer technology company that was facing a challenge with its ERP system. To stay agile in its marketplace, Ortec needed to make a wholesale change of its backend ERP system to Microsoft Dynamics, but making such a sweeping change threatened to drive up its CapEx and OpEx costs. Ortec was able to deploy the Microsoft SQL Server & Dynamics development environments on Net3’s Actifio-driven platform. This N3T Cloud-based approach allowed Ortec to plan, prepare, design, implement, operate, and optimize the new ERP system without a dime being spent on new capital infrastructure.
The Actifio platform allowed N3T to make an exact clone of Ortec’s production environment in minutes so that the most recent data could be placed into the Dev/Test and UAT environments. Using N3T also allowed Ortec’s development team to roll the fully vetted test environment directly into production. Once it was placed into production, Ortec decided to keep the new ERP at PvDC and to use Net3’s backup-as-a-service offering that is also driven by Actifio. This allowed Ortec to create the exact SLAs needed for each application and to have both instantly accessible snapshots and long-term deduped backups.
“Working with Net3 has been a huge win for us,” said Ortec’s Jeremy Knight, manager of information technology, “There’s no way we would have been able to deploy this new Microsoft Dynamics environment as quickly as we did, without their Actifio-based services. Plus we now know that our mission-critical ERP system is protecting according to the standards our business demands.”
“Net3 is making the vision for flexible, automated cloud services a reality for their customers – going beyond basic IAAS, to delivering business value that their clients need,” said Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio. “Our work with forward-thinking companies like N3T is enabling enterprise customers to drastically cut their time to market and break free of traditional infrastructure limitations, so they can focus on growing their business.”
