Image via CrunchBase
With apologies to Zanussi for the corny title, I had an interesting conversation with Axcient CEO Justin Moore and HP’s VP for Channel Strategy & SMB Meaghan Kelly about the issues of helping small and medium businesses cope with backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity.
Yesterday’s conversation was taking place in the context of today’s announcement from HP and Axcient; Axcient’s US data centres are moving to HP servers, networking and storage, and the appliance that the company puts on-site with customers will be an HP ProLiant server moving forward.
According to Moore, most SMBs use “4 or more” vendor solutions to “cobble together” a data protection solution. Basic application and data backup, disaster recovery from off-site backup, and business continuity in the event of hardware failure are all addressed separately, and it can be difficult to stitch the pieces together without dedicated — and expert — effort. I wonder how many companies, especially at the ‘S’ end of ‘SMB,’ simply give up on attempting anything but the most rudimentary on-site backup… and hope that nothing goes wrong?
Axcient’s solution is different, as the company offers a single appliance (an HP server, running Axcient’s applications) that can be deployed locally. There is no up-front cost for the appliance, with both it and the ongoing service being billed on a recurring monthly subscription. Software on the appliance handles backing up applications and data on servers, desktops and laptops across the business, and securely replicates changed data to one of Axcient’s US data centres for backup and disaster recovery. Should critical hardware fail within the business, a virtual machine can be started on the appliance to fulfil the role of the failed equipment until it is repaired or replaced. Indeed, Moore suggested that the ProLiant server they’ve selected would be capable of taking the place of up to seven servers if required; presumably with a perceptible loss of performance. Slow responses from a straining appliance are no doubt preferable to no response at all from seven dead servers.
Axcient’s data centres are currently in the United States, raising the spectre of PATRIOT Act, European Data Protection legislation, data territoriality and more for those of us outside the US. Moore recognises this issue, and says that the company is in the process of opening a Canadian data centre. Sites in Europe and elsewhere may well follow.
Both HP and Axcient are pitching this solution to the entire SMB market; that’s everything from the lone consultant operating out of a home office up to businesses employing 1,000 staff. They’re certainly right to address the whole market and the top end is probably more lucrative, especially for HP’s channel partners. I was particularly interested, though, in the value that this might deliver to small businesses struggling to do much more than replicate core data to an external hard drive under their desk. Here, the $150 per month ballpark that Moore mentioned is expensive, but perhaps a sound investment if data and systems are key to business success.
With their reliance upon asynchronous data connections and effectively consumer-grade connectivity, one significant issue for small businesses is the practicality of trickling all of their on-premise data slowly up to an Axcient data centre before they can begin to reap benefits. With their ‘rapid seeding service,’ Axcient appear to have thought of this. If connectivity issues mean that network-based methods to replicate all your on-premise data are going to be too slow, it’s possible to transfer the data to a storage device attached to the appliance, “ship that in a locked container” to an Axcient data centre, and have the data loaded there to be available within 48 hours. The incremental backups of new and changed blocks then take place over the network without causing issues. Simple, obvious, but a sign that Axcient appears to be considering the needs of their smaller customers.
(Cross-posted @ Paul Miller – The Cloud of Data)
I used to work at axcient and I have a warning for anyone who uses this product.
Be very careful with the axcient product on your network. Once you create your backup devices, tech support has free roam on your servers and regularly logs in to them using winexe (part of the samba suite) from the axcient appliance.
Why do they do this?. Well, when you contact support with an issue, first thing they do is access your servers via the command line and will query configuration settings. They will actually make configuration changes like stopping/restarting services, re-register dll’s without any permission or notification for the resellers. Ask support if they ever make/do anything to customers servers to work past issues without permission first. If they say no, they are lying. Also, ask them what MachinePassTool.jar is and what it is for. Hint, it dumps all usernames and password for all configured devices.
Call Julian, the director of support and ask him. However, he is known for not actually telling the truth and is an accomplished BS artist. I’m sure he’ll put a nice spin on it for you.
Their so called colo is just a bunch of Franken boxes that constantly lockup. Ever wonder why your offsite backups seem to take forever or never complete. Well, it’s because the server locked up. There is no redundancy at all in the colo, so your data could in theory be lost. They have no redundant colo in place to mirror your data, but is all at one location. Tech support also will go over your data at the colo and check out your files, especially pictures and music files. Don’t buy into the gen2 colo they are now starting to call it. It is still not up and running. Oh, did I say that there is no physical redundancy at the colo for your data?
I suggest you ask for a disaster recovery drill. They will try to discourage you by charging hundreds for this simple task as they have no set procedure in place.
Be very careful of these guys, but call support and ask for Julian. Pin him down on the above. However, if you value privacy of your customers, you should not use this product.