October 25, 2011
In a move that changes the landscape in cloud data protection, Axcient today announced the ability to immediately recover not only an organization’s data, but the full computing environment instantly. This is a big deal, especially for small businesses to medium enterprises that may well be using best practices, that is, a local appliance that connects with the cloud, for data protection.
The problem is, after a disaster, all of the computing resources are gone. Think of the many companies that endured the recent earthquake followed by a hurricane in the populous Virginia to Boston corridor. Your precious server farm is gone. You have your data at a cloud provider, but you have lost your infrastructure to access it. You need to rebuild your infrastructure, which involves more than a trip to Best Buy or CDW. And you are down. No email, no orders, no invoices, no database transactions – you are out of business.
Axcient has answered this problem with a most elegant implementation. With the local Axcient appliance and heavy HP-backed infrastructure, Axcient can provide full application and data availability to their customers with a log-on and two clicks.
This is a huge game changer in the data protection and disaster recovery business, and places Axcient in the center of the huge elastic compute business. The biggest push back from enterprises going into cloud computing is the huge amount of work involved in changing the application interfaces to the cloud environment. Axcient has solved this problem in a new and inventive way. With an Axcient appliance installation, the information base to recover the full computing environment is known. This allows a client interface to access all of the applications without any work, and without a painful trip through purchasing to re-provision the hardware environment.
Early adopters of the Axcient Cloud Continuity product have found interesting use cases, beyond data protection. Users have immediately realized the ability to stand up test and development use cases without impact to production systems. That is simple. But consider the ability to verify data protection operations out of bandwidth is a quality assurance dream.
At a cost of $24 per server per month, I asked CEO Justin Moore why , after a disaster, anyone would migrate back to a physical environment. His answer was simple: “They shouldn’t.”
Our Take: We have been fans of Axcient since their debut and have followed their alliance with HP and expansion of product capabilities. We feel that Cloud Continuity is a game changer and puts Axcient into a central position to provide cloud computing services.
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