Axcient: Software replaces hardware to improve cloud disaster recovery efficiency

Thanks to the technological advances in backend systems, cloud-based disaster recovery, a service (DRaaS) provider, is increasingly efficient at storing customer data while restoring Web sites more quickly.

Axcient company recently launched a large-scale upgrade work. In the DRaaS market, Axcient is a relatively new company. The company says that by replacing expensive patented hardware solutions with software solutions to manage commercial hardware, the power required to back up the entire business has been reduced by 66%, and the capacity required to store data has been reduced by half. However, these improvements are only some of the features that customers should be concerned with when evaluating cloud Dr Providers.

Axcient, founded in 2006 in Mountain View, Calif., has been supported by Allegis Capital, Peninsula Ventures, thomvest and scale Venture, and now has more than 3,500 customers. Many customers work with the company through a channel of more than 1,500 partners who are responsible for reselling local tools that can back up data to the axcient cloud.

Axcient uses a solution that incorporates local tools to manage the backup to the Axcient back-end system as a gateway between the customer Web site and the Axcient cloud. On the Axcient cloud, the company replaces the Flash and hard drives with a SAS drive, replacing the network component with a RAID card. The new software algorithm reduces the metadata needed to restore the site. Last year, Axcient's cloud increased by four bytes of storage. In addition, the company says it can obtain a single copy of business operations from multiple recovery points via cloud-based systems.

Axcient is now trying to make a debut in a market dominated by companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and SunGard availability services. Gartner, a market research institute, predicts that the market value of the DRaaS market will reach $5.7 billion by 2018.

Customers will benefit from a growing number of providers using software solutions to manage systems made up of commercially available hardware. Outsourcing a disaster recovery business to a provider can reduce the capital investment required by the customer. For companies that have multiple sites and want to back up the sites in one place, this provides a simpler architecture.

There are still a number of factors that must be taken into account, the main concern being network capacity constraints. "The key performance metric is the rate at which virtual machine mirroring is transferred locally to the cloud," said John Morency, a Gartner expert on disaster recovery. Network capacity limitations and widespread latency can pose many problems. "Many vendors built WAN optimization schemes to reduce network latency. However, companies should consider what options they have if they need to quickly start a business continuity plan.

Another concern is that partnering with manufacturers, especially with similar axcient, will involve the relationship between providers and resellers. Customers may access the Axcient service through Third-party resellers or vendors. In some environments, the responsibility for service level agreements (SLAs) and continuity guarantees is likely to be a reseller, rather than a axcient vendor.

There are many ways to solve these problems. For network latency issues, users can transfer more network load to the cloud. In this case, the failure redundancy of the disaster system is the internal exchange of the cloud, not the exchange between the local system and the cloud service. For the second concern, vendors may be able to collaborate more directly with customers rather than through channel partners.