Axcient Revamps Cloud Storage Offering With All-HP Gear

Data protection and disaster recovery vendor Axcient has completely revamped its cloud storage offering with the adoption of an HP-only storage, server, and networking infrastructure.

Starting Wednesday, solution provider and managed service provider partners of Axcient will find the Mountain View, Calif.-based company's cloud-based data protection and disaster recovery system running on the HP Converged Infrastructure platform, said Justin Moore, founder and CEO.

The HP Converged Infrastructure combines HP's server, storage, and networking products into a pool of shared resources managed through a common management platform.

With the new agreement between Axcient and HP, Axcient's data protection platform starts with an HP ProLiant server-based appliance that sits at the customer site to do quick backups and restores and to provide failover of downed servers for business continuity. That appliance is further connected to Axcient’s cloud-based disaster recovery service, which is also based on HP products, for a complete data protection solution.

"The entire Axcient portfolio, including the local appliance, the backup infrastructure, and local storage, will all be based on HP technology," Moore said.

Moore said Axcient is the first cloud storage vendor to adopt a single vendor's infrastructure from front to back. He contrasted that to the typical fragmented infrastructure most SMBs have in place to handle data protection and disaster recovery.

"SMBs are using four or more vendors to do data protection," he said. "Those vendors address themselves as software vendors, or business continuity vendors, or hardware providers, or service providers. So it's a very fragmented system."

Axcient itself had been working with a variety of architectures based on commodity hardware to offer such cloud-based services as bare metal recovery, data backups, and backups of applications like Exchange and SharePoint for servers, laptops, and desktops, Moore said.

"Now we can do it all from a single platform," he said.

Axcient's channel partners can take advantage of a single solution for their cloud storage customers that scales from 250 GBs to 20 TBs on a single on-premise appliance, one that can handle the simultaneous failover of up to seven servers, Moore said.

On the back end, Axcient's storage cloud can scale to beyond 10 petabytes of storage in a single location, compared to 1 petabyte under its previous architecture.

The Axcient data backup solution lets channel partners offer the service to customers with no up-front purchase of the hardware or software, and no per-server licensing, Moore said. Instead, customers pay a flat monthly fee regardless of the number of users.

That fee, which starts at $150 per month depending on the total capacity of the on-premises appliance, reduces the sales cycle for partners, Moore said.

Axcient offers three levels of protection. At the "backup" level, customers get backup and restore capabilities for physical and virtual environments. At the "protect" level, customer also get rapid offsite seeding of the backup plus application-specific backups for Exchange, SharePoint, Active Discovery, and SQL. At the "fortify" level, they also get bare metal restore and local virtual failover for Windows servers.

NEXT: Making It Easy For Axcient Partners

"We make it easier for partners to go to their users and tell them they can have their entire environment including virtualized servers backed up," Moore said. "They can be sure their data is replicated offsite. And they can do it without up-front fees."

Because the Axcient cloud backup and recovery platform is now based on HP technology, it will be especially appealing to HP solution providers looking for a recurring revenue model, Moore said. However, it is open to all partners, he said.

The relationship between Axcient and HP came about when Meaghan Kelly, vice president of channel strategy and SMB in HP's Solution Partner Organization, invited Moore to sit on the board of the HP Startup and Venture Capital Advisory Council, a group of 15 venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who help HP examine potential investments.

"I was honored that HP approached me, so I joined the council," Moore said. "Overtime, they saw we both had a similar focus on and passion for the channel."