This is a preparation blog post before I travel to Boston for Tech Field Day 11. You can find more information about Tech Field Day, the other presenters, and the other delegates here on the TFD website.
Disclosure: TFD are paying my airfare and accommodation to attend TFD11. I’m sure there will be gifts and catering from the presenters and TFD while we’re there. Everything I write about what I learn at TFD will be my opinion and will not be reviewed by TFD or the presenters. There is also no obligation or expectation that I will write about any or all of the presenters.
Let’s start with what Crunchbase has to offer. Actifio was founded in July 2009 and has closed six rounds of funding for a total of $207.5M. The last round was over two years ago, so they must now be (at least close to) profitable to not need more cash. With the last two investment rounds being two and three years ago I would expect the investors to be interested in when they are going to get paid out. With the current IPO market, it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of potential for listing. So who might want to buy Actifio? Maybe a large storage vendor (who is merging with another vendor of storage). With a portfolio consolidation, they might want the IP around storage migrations.
Actifio has been in the market for a while. They provide in-line storage virtualization with an appliance. It that sits between your existing storage array and whatever is consuming the storage. Their particular magic is in making logical copies of data. This serves functions such as backups, testing, and DR systems as well as allowing mobility from one storage array to another. The mobility function is particularly useful if you have a large estate of storage from one vendor that you need to migrate to a new vendor’s platform. Actifio will handle this migration for you.
So what might Actifio have for us at TFD? I really hope it’s a left field innovation. I’m not aware that Actifio has made any major changes to their product in the years since they came to market. I really hope that they have seen an opportunity to solve a big problem. I hope it isn’t something like putting flash in the appliance to accelerate your old back-end array. Or the ability to use an all-flash array as a hot tier to the older slower array and push backups to a colder tier on cloud-based object storage.
© 2016, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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