Online Tech and Actifio partner to make long-term data storage cheaper, easier

Rapidly changing technology can make it difficult to retain and retrieve old files in useful formats, but a new partnership between Ann Arbor's Online Tech and Massachusetts IT company Actifio aims to address that challenge.

Some industries, such as the healthcare field, need records that can go back several years or even a decade. Retaining both the files and the quickly-outdated hardware and software needed to retrieve files that old can be challenging and expensive. Jason Yaeger, senior director of solutions architecture and security officer at Online Tech, says the partnership between Actifio and his company allows clients to recover up to 10 10-terabyte databases in under 10 minutes.

Online Tech runs five data centers and two cloud-computing infrastructures in the Midwest, and specializes in solutions for large businesses that need to keep backup or disaster recovery files. Actifio's OnVault software allows companies to retrieve large sets of data quickly and cheaply, and to eliminate the need for keeping duplicate sets of data.

"With this service, using Actifio's software, we're able to archive the information for whatever retention period (clients) want," Yaeger says. "If they want to stop using Online Tech, that data is then stored in a compressed native format and can be retrieved at any time with a free tool. They're not reliant on using our service or Actifio."

The partnership will also allow Online Tech to streamline customers' development practices. For instance, when building a website, a company will typically go through multiple stages from development to testing to quality assurance.

"You may end up with four copies of the same dataset that could amount to four or more terabytes of data," Yaeger says. "Because we can instantly recover data and virtualize datasets, you can delete that instance of the data, and then instantly mount it again during the next phase. It saves on having to save sprawling datasets from a development viewpoint."

Yaeger says the partnership with Actifio will play a key role in Online Tech's future. Clients' infrastructure costs continue to fall, so if Online Tech just kept providing the same services to the same clients, the company's revenue would stagnate and then drop. The company has managed to avoid that problem so far, showing steady growth in recent years.

"With the ever-decreasing cost of cloud infrastructure, companies like Online Tech need to increase the value to our clients by solving more of their technical and business challenges," Yaeger says. "The partnership with Actifio will help enable our growth."

This piece is part of a series highlighting local business growth in the Ann Arbor area. It is supported by Ann Arbor SPARK.