“The right disaster recovery solutions should allow users to restore their machine and recover their data just right before the attacks – this is the case with Tina & Lina.”
In the real world, only 20 percent of companies actually have a disaster recovery plan in place. It’s often the first thing administrators think about, but in reality, it’s last on their priority list. So, when disaster strikes, the alarm bells start ringing and without a genuine battle plan to lean on, data recovery can be hit and miss. Atempo professional services guide organizations and help put in place a rock-solid disaster recovery plan, so, not if but when the plan needs to be carried out, it will be a simple checklist to get your business back on track in minimum time.
Since 1992, Atempo’s technological DNA has been to empower customers to fully protect and fully recover all their data, with the flagship solution Time Navigator (Tina). For many years Tina has protected thousands of customers worldwide, enabling them to journey back in time to recover data – systems, applications, and files- from any point in the past. With exploding data volumes and requirements for increased data availability, Atempo created ADA (Atempo Digital Archive) in 2009, to help companies archive, protect and store huge volumes of unstructured data. Intuitive retrieval interfaces, multi-platform support, and innovative data movement and management capacities meant Atempo enjoyed rapid and widespread success, especially in the Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry. Atempo rose to the occasion and now works with many Hollywood majors providing them with cost-effective management of their image assets workflows.
Petabyte-scale levels of data is no longer the sole domain of the M&E industry; more and more organizations are hitting and exceeding these levels. Research, healthcare, fintech, IoT, space, petrol and gas exploration are just some of the sectors creating thousands of terabytes of new unstructured data every day. Built on ADA’s data moving and management platform, Atempo developed Miria in 2019, a software-driven approach that extends the range of services to customers. On the back of ADA’s considerable success in moving and managing very large volumes of data, Miria continues to archive and also to enable petabyte-scale NAS backups to multiple storage targets, NAS synchronizations, and NAS-to-NAS data migrations and copies.
Atempo is spearheaded by CEO, Luc d’Urso who has nurtured a stimulating work environment, a clear course of action from a strategic point of view and effective tools to achieve stated goals. He has engaged with leading hardware vendors as he believes the highest standards of performance can only be achieved through extensive integration. “It will come as no surprise that I firmly believe in the power and vitality of IT ecosystems. My teams also expect me to act as the guardian of our strategic activities and ensure that what we do turns into tangible and durable benefits for our customers, partners and staff,” says Luc resolutely. “My teams tend to describe me as a manager who sets the pace whilst ensuring everyone is on board and I would very humbly say that I try to listen and observe attentively and make decisions when several options are discussed. Others may well achieve more results within their working hours, but it cheers me to think that I may well laugh more often than they do each day!”
Need for Speed
Speed is of the essence when data has been attacked or a machine breaks down because we are living in a 24×7 world with almost zero downtime. Businesses must continue to operate, and critical data must be available at all times. Think of a hospital without its patient records, think of the amount of digital data that is protected every day. The daily protection of this data occurs behind the scenes without you even thinking about it. Atempo shines a light on the different backup scenarios for each data set and the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) that best fits each organization. When a machine breaks down, a replica can kick in automatically. When the network suddenly goes down between sites, data protection will continue seamlessly.
Data recovery is essential for organizations. Even more so in 2020, where distributed remote working really brought home the need to have intuitive recovery solutions, not just for administrators but also for the users. Working from home means that data decentralization has become the norm. Lina transparently safeguards data on the fly with continuous data protection. It empowers the end-users to be able to restore themselves with straightforward interfaces designed for non-IT professionals. Recent months have been challenging and hackers wasted little time infiltrating our networks and corrupting our data. Tina protects enterprise data and ensures that in the event of a hack, administrators can turn back the clock to before the crisis began. Administrators can synchronize to any backup date with time navigation, see at a glance data that has been modified or even deleted. Data can be recovered to physical or virtual machines to different locations and cross restored to another server.
Ideally, a disaster recovery solution should allow users to restore their machine and recover their data just right before the attacks or the data loss. This is absolutely the case with Tina & Lina. “We like to think we are ready in the event of a disaster, and that we have watertight processes in place if disaster hits, but we are all human and the stress of being in a disaster recovery situation requires solid tools to do the job and recover data efficiently,” says Heather Shiers, Tina Product Manager.
According to Luc, the major players in the present industry are mostly American. A unified American market, access to sizeable venture capital, as evidenced by the recent funding of some of the competitors associated with the excellence of their marketing teams, are the conditions which allow them to dominate proceedings. With more limited resources, Atempo has positioned itself in certain niches on the strength of proven technological excellence. By creating innovative concepts in the field of backup, such as Time Navigation, we have progressively won new accounts from demanding customers in banking and finance, aviation, media and entertainment, medical research, and life sciences..
Leveraging Technology for Business Transformation
Atempo has built a large customer base of global mid-sized and corporate organizations operating out of Europe, the United States and Asia. Having signed partnerships with leading HPC vendors, such as DDN, Qumulo or Huawei, Atempo now has new customer targets and is developing solutions to help them overcome new data management challenges that did not even exist two years ago. The company is also actively developing new technological partnerships with recent inroads such as Scaleway, OVHcloud, Wasabi Inc, Nutanix. In 2019, Atempo opened an advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) Innovation and Research Center in Orleans, France. This research lab, called Nextino, concentrates on analytical support, machine learning, deep machine learning and AI for data management, protection and migration solutions for large and very large data volumes.
An instance showcasing the capabilities of Atempo is the University Hospital in Angers (CHU Angers), Western France, a major health pole with three main missions: health care, teaching and research. With over 100,000 hospital patients and 460 000 consultations per year, CHU Angers is one of the key health establishments in France. Tina was chosen and deployed in the CHU to protect hospital data. “Tina enabled us to recover all our data following a Cryptolocker attack. It showed its strength with the time navigation module, which allowed us to restore from just prior to the attack. We were able to limit our losses and rapidly restore millions of files for all our users,” says Thierry Herrijgers, IT Infrastructure Manager, University Hospital in Angers.
Looking ahead, we are set to witness the data volumes rise from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 zettabytes in 2025 (Source IDC). That’s a 61 percent year-on-year increase and just storing this amount of data will be a genuine industrial challenge. A challenge that Atempo is already meeting full on. Extracting value from unstructured data, machine learning and AI will be at the heart of many business drivers. Ensuring big data is available for analysis and value extraction will be crucial for many enterprises. Handling data in the petabyte, exabyte and zettabyte era will require innovative hardware technology, from silicon chips to network layers and storage devices. Trying to deal with Big Data with conventional storage solutions is like trying to empty an ocean with a straw. AI will significantly increase IO performance requirements. Advanced data management solutions such as Atempo Miria will provide optimal ROI for storage architecture investment.
Alongside this, data handling software will enable companies to protect, move, synchronize, and copy billions of files locally and remotely. Including to tape, which will continue to be a reasonably priced target for offline (“air-gapped”) or nearline data. The cloud cannot handle all storage requirements alone and there will be a hybrid element to future storage needs. In addition, as highlighted by the coronavirus crisis, people are increasingly working indifferently from home, from a central or remote office, or on the road. Traditional workspace boundaries are rapidly evolving. Data protection solutions must be able to follow the worker and their data wherever they are and maintain the same high standards of data availability.
