Atempo is a globally renowned data protection and management software, vendor. For many years their Time Navigation (Tina) solution 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. Tina continues to thrive but Atempo is today shifting emphasis from backup to global data management. Why? In an era of high redundancy and cloud-delivered services, the emphasis is less on protecting on-premise applications and systems. But unstructured data levels (files, images, emails…) continue to rise exponentially and this data needs to be stored locally or remotely. The challenge is not only to protect this data but move it, copy it and synchronize it.
This is where Atempo’s Miria takes the stage.
Miria manages new and evolving storage needs as well as the obsolescence of existing storage facilities. Companies can now choose between new generations of NAS, object storages, or specific file systems, either in their data center or in the cloud. One of the key steps in these storage redesign projects is the migration of existing data to new storage environments.
“We designed our Miria solution while listening to our customers and technology partners. Many had problems migrating or protecting large amounts of data in heterogeneous storage, such as NAS, object storage, or specific file systems, in their data center or in the cloud. They wanted to be able to protect, archive, move and migrate data easily, with great scalability and flexibility without impacting their production. Miria fully meets these needs by offering a powerful solution that can handle heterogeneous environments and large volumes of data.” said Hervé Collard, VP Marketing at Atempo.
Petabyte-scale levels of data are reached and exceeded by a growing number of organizations. Research, fin-tech, IoT, space, petrol, and gas exploration are just some of the sectors creating thousands of terabytes of new unstructured data every day.
Looking ahead to 2020 and beyond, we will see data volumes rise from 33 zettabytes today globally to 175 zettabytes in 2025 (Source IDC). That’s a 61% year-on-year increase and just storing this amount of data will be a genuine industrial challenge. It is 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.
“One of the biggest strengths of Atempo is the choice that we give to our customers, in terms of compatibility and data storage destination. We fit into their existing infrastructure and provide the solution to get the job done well and fast. Our business is to manage petabytes and more of critical data,” asserts Luc d’Urso, CEO of Atempo.
Handling data in the petabyte, exabyte and zettabyte era will require innovative hardware technology, from silicon chips to network layer and storage management. It will also require software to protect, move, synchronize and copy billions of files and petabytes of data both locally and remotely, including to tape which will continue to be a reasonably-priced target for offline or nearline data. The cloud cannot handle all requirements alone and there will be a hybrid element to future storage needs.
Atempo commercializes three variants of their Miria platform:
- Miria for Migration – Atempo has many customers who fairly frequently change or upgrade their NAS. They require Atempo’s services and software to transfer their data without any downtime or data loss during the process. Rapid and secure, Miria for Migration cuts the time to switch storages to a minimum. One example of a migration project involved migrating almost 3 PB of data and approximately 650 million files for a US Defense provider. The task consisted of migrating data between two different vendor storages with complex clustered nodes. The final incremental synchronization could not exceed 48 hours. Atempo managed and implemented the whole project in under 3 weeks.
- Miria for Backup – Let’s cite the example of the University of Lausanne (UNIL), a major Swiss education and research pole. UNIL research staff generates billions of small and large files. In total, UNIL needs to back up data from two replicated Isilon NAS to an EMC object storage. Miria and its scalable data moving capacity today manages several petabytes of data. Rapid backup times and conservation of access rights information are vital to this customer. Miria covers all bases and ensures file-level recovery as well as disaster recovery in a single tool. No other data movement company was able to come close to Atempo’s response.
- Miria for Archiving – Free up space in the most efficient and expensive primary storage and preserve digital assets over time. Miria for Archiving addresses archiving needs of all sizes up to exabyte levels. Atempo recently completed a major project with DiRAC (Distributed Research Utilizing Advanced Computing), a British supercomputing facility for theoretical modeling and HPC-based research in particle physics, astronomy, cosmology, and nuclear physics. The project was to archive several petabytes of HPC (High-Performance Computing) data for their UK research departments.
Atempo is not resting on its laurels. The company has recently opened an advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) Innovation and Research Center in Orleans, France. The research lab, Nextino, will concentrate on analytical support, machine learning, deep machine learning and AI for data management, protection and migration solutions for large and very large data volumes. “Nextino’s objective is to prepare future solutions by developing high value-added software components which will help customers achieve significant productivity gains, simplify the user experience, assist them in the decision-making process, increase security and guarantee the confidentiality for their data”, declared Bernard Peultier, Nextino’s COO & VP Innovation.
Digital data is the most precious asset in the 21st century. This strategic asset is stored and processed in systems comprised of sophisticated, complex and diverse applications and storages. At Atempo, we see data as being in permanent mutation, much like a natural ecosystem; a concept which seems more appropriate than that of the environment so frequently used in IT. In much the same way as a natural ecosystem, the quality of a data ecosystem is measured by its capacity to evolve over time, maintain equilibrium, resist outside aggression, and recover without delay.
“Atempo takes care of all your data protection and management needs. Miria is a go-to solution for all sectors and industries because no-one will be able to avoid investing in tools for managing massive data sets” affirms Luc D’Urso.
Luc d’Urso – Chief Executive Officer
Graduate of ESCAE (Business Administration School), Luc d’Urso began his career at the European headquarters of Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America), based in Geneva (Switzerland).
In the Marketing Department, he worked in the Aerospace and Armament markets. An entrepreneur at heart, Luc then pursued his career in the sports industry where he developed the Mistral windsurfing brands, the Reflex water ski, and the Lacroix snowboard brands, before co-founding in 1997, the telecom operator Futur Telecom (MVNO) which he sold to SFR in 2007. In 2010, he founded Wooxo, French software solutions dedicated to the protection of computer data. In August 2017, in partnership with Cyprien Roy, he acquired ATEMPO, the European leader in data protection, from the American group ASG Technologies, and then acquired Synerway.
