For every important application in an organization, there are dozens of snapshots, clones and other non-production workloads bogging down the storage team. An estimated 70 percent of the enterprise IT budgets goes towards maintaining such information, a burden that Axcient Inc. promises to reduce considerably with its newest service.

Fusion, as it’s called, is a cloud-based storage platform that provides a centralized environment for safekeeping auxiliary data. Holding everything in the same place removes the need to operate separate infrastructure for every workload, which eliminates many of the duplicate maintenance tasks that administrators have historically had to perform. As a result, IT departments can spend more resources on other activities like figuring out ways to reduce their organizations’ hardware requirements. Axcient has helpfully included a number of optimization capabilities in Fusion to streamline the process.

The company says that built-in global deduplication makes it possible to shrink the storage footprint of a workload by up to 30 times, while a complementary WAN optimization mechanism reduces network transfer times. And administrators can cut resource consumption even further by configuring retention policies to automatically delete data after a certain period of time. The latter feature is useful not only for ensuring that duplicate records don’t take up space after they outlive their usefulness, but also for maintaining regulatory compliance. Companies in industries such as healthcare and financial services are legally prohibited from holding onto sensitive customer information for too long.

Despite its broad feature set, however, Axcient says that Fusion takes only about 10 minutes to set up. This ease-of-use should go a long way towards helping the firm compete with the numerous other vendors out there that focus on consolidating non-production data. Some, like Actifio Inc., offer their technology in a similar cloud-based form, while others sell on-premise appliances that provide the same functionality but behind the firewall. Both approaches are gaining a lot of traction in the enterprise.

Image via Geralt