NTP Software
Cloud-Based and On-Premise Solution for Efficient Data Management

F or years, Moore’s Law and Silicon Valley innovation have made each generation of technology more than worth the price. Today, the corporate world is overflowing with revolutionary ideas for flexible and scalable data storage and management. “The opportunities to add value here lie in reducing infrastructure complexity, better management, limiting risk, and lowering costs,” says Bruce Backa, CEO of NTP Software. For over 15 years, NTP Software has strived to make owning file data easier—through controlling expenditures and risk reduction—by leveraging their position in the industry and their partnership with NetApp.

Headquartered in Nashua, NH, NTP Software—together with NetApp— provides a fully automated private cloud- based solution for file data management. “NTP Software’s technology allows customers to control their environment with a single set of policies, regardless of the files’ location(s),” claims Backa.

File data, as it lives over time, has three states: active files—less than nine months old; mature files—10 to 24 months old; and unused and stale files—more than two years with no access over that entire time. “Sixty to eighty percent of all file data is mature or stale. The bulk of all files are unused, cluttering up primary file systems, adding excessive cost to maintain the storage system,” adds Backa.

By incorporating additional features into NetApp’s technology, NTP Software extends the primary file system of their customers to include the mature and stale files that are located elsewhere. “We reduce the primary storage of our customers as much as 80 percent, while maintaining seamless accessibility, which makes storage systems simpler and easier to manage,” explicates Backa. The company also has acclaimed expertise in Common Internet File System (CIFS) and Network File Systems (NFS), which facilitates their clients’ file sharing over the internet. “NetApp is the only platform other than Windows to provide feature parity for NFS and CIFS. That’s a real accomplishment on NetApp’s part and it has tremendous value to many of our customers,” adds Backa.

Furthermore, NTP Software also provides the software backbone for the NetApp E-Tiering Cloud Appliance (ETCA) built with NetApp E-Series storage. The NTP Software engine for this appliance includes policy governance, file catalogs, and web access portal for immediate access to files removed from primary storage.

In addition, NTP Software engine also relocates files from one place to another as per the policies, and provides detailed reporting of file usage.

NTP Software’s technology has a proven history of enhancing client operations and improving their efficiency to attain increased control and flexibility. For instance, a global financial services client discovered that 80 percent of their incremental backups were Outlook Personal Storage Table (PST) files. “The challenge faced by them was that, their backups were all or nothing,” adds Backa. NTP Software created a policy to limit the size of PST files and brought a 60 percent reduction in backups decreasing the workload and the time to complete them. The time to ROI on this customer’s investment was 42 days.

Over the years, working with platform vendors like NetApp, Microsoft, EMC, and HDS has increased the integration capabilities of NTP Software. “In a multi-system environment, our software automatically figures out the nodes to replicate and the pattern to follow,” says Backa. As a proven advantage in line with their customer’s expectations, NTP Software’s integration capabilities across platforms like Windows and Linux gives end users a single application to manage.

NTP Software’s technology allows customers to control their environment with a single set of policies, regardless of the files’ location(s)

For days ahead, the company aims to partner with trailblazers who deliver best-in-class data capture and analysis technology. Moreover, “management of video surveillance data presents a big opportunity for us,” adds Backa. It is an emerging market that generates over 10s of petabytes of data each year and NTP Software is poised to provide technologies that empower companies to handle this data effectively.