Storage Startup Tackles Data Backup and Recovery

Company:

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.

Technology Sector: Storage

Key Product: RapidRestore Data Backup Services

Year Founded: 2008

Number of Channel Partners: 100-plus in North America

Ideal Channel Partner: Small business-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Axcient offers a smart hybrid of hardware and hosted services to deliver robust data storage to small businesses.

The Lowdown: Data backup and recovery vendor Axcient emerged from stealth mode in March with an array of hybrid on-premises appliance and cloud-based storage services targeting small businesses. The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup, which is focusing on SMBs with as few as five employees, is also pursuing a channel-only model, said CEO Justin Moore. Since its soft launch last November, the company has signed up more than 100 channel partners who collectively have sold Axcient services to some several hundred SMB customers.

Axcient picked a devil of a time to hit the market -- in the heart of the worst economic recession in decades (though as Moore points out, his plans to build the company were laid out years before last September's market crash). Still, Axcient remains a startup in challenging times -- and Moore, surprisingly, wouldn't have it any other way.

"If you think about it, startups don't make much money in the first year or two anyway. We'd rather be in the start-up phase during the downturn than entering the mature phase right now," he said.

Axcient's combination of on-premise appliances and Internet-based data backup provides customers with the failsafe of cloud archiving behind local storage which provides fast restores, Moore said. Appliances come in three different form factors, including a set-top and 1u and 2u rack-mount units. And Axcient doesn't sell the appliances -- they are included as part of the monthly platform fee, which starts at under $100.

The 1u rack mount appliance from Axcient comes in three flavors -- the 500GB model is recommended for up to 10 users, the 1TB version for up to 25 and the 1.5TB unit for up to 50 users. Built in conjunction with Bell Microproducts, the appliance includes RAID capability and redundant power supplies. Incremental changes in customer data are encrypted and backed up on a regular basis. Services include Axcient's RapidRestore Data Backup, SmartArchive Data Retention and SmartDR Disaster Recovery.

The big gun in Axcient's arsenal is its 2u rack mount, starting at 3TB on a unit boasting up to 10TB storage capacity.

Solution providers can come in at one of four levels, said Victor Neeley, vice president of sales at Axcient. At the preferred partner level, Axcient will do co-billing with the partner for customers, collect the payments and pass commissions to the partner.

"This lets them focus on getting new customers and working with existing customers," Neely said. "Partners can mark up the service however they want, and can set different prices for different levels of service."

Axcient builds its Linux-based management software in-house, keeping a small team of developers on the payroll. Both the online and local storage are managed centrally through an easy-to-use dashboard.

"Customers can see everything that's connected to the storage, and manage the storage remotely," Moore said. "They can see all the storage in a single window, its status, and any alerts, and can practice pro-active management."

Why the hybridized offering? Axcient's CEO points out that different storage issues require different solutions.

"Online is great for backup, but not for recovery," Moore said. "For fast data recovery, having a local appliance is important. Also, having a local appliance means no agents are needed for the backups. So customers can set up an Axcient solution quickly. We've had resellers set customers up in as few as five minutes."