Axcient's Fusion Brings Disaster Recovery As A Service To Midmarket, Enterprise

Axcient is scaling its disaster-recovery-as-a-service technology to the midmarket and enterprise with Tuesday's introduction of its Fusion cloud platform, designed to bring together the data from all of a customer's nonproductive workloads into a single easily managed platform.

Axcient's Fusion combines the company's hardware-less disaster recovery and archiving technology with a public cloud infrastructure on the back end to let customers more efficiently manage the data from multiple workloads, said Justin Moore, CEO of the Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor.

This includes data that typically exists in their own silos and needs to be managed separately, including data from such nonproductive workloads as backup and recovery, disaster recovery, business continuity, archiving, test and development, and data warehousing and analytics, Moore told CRN.

[Related: EFolder Buys Replibit For Data Protection Tech, Says Deal Will Not Impact Other Partners]

Fusion allows customers to consolidate data from those workloads into a single cloud-converged platform that can be set up and deployed in 10 minutes, Moore said. It delivers data efficiency with global data deduplication and in-line WAN optimization, and provides the ability to replicate snapshots to the cloud in less than 90 seconds, he said.

The introduction of Fusion, which required three years of development, is a big step for Axcient, which in the past concentrated on providing disaster recovery as a service to SMBs, Moore said.

"Over the years, we had more enterprises come to us to leverage our services to simplify their IT infrastructures or reduce costs," he said. "Some of these companies have thousands or tens of thousands of users, but our original technology was not designed for that level of complexity. We weren't designed for that scale. Our typical customers had tens of servers."

Axcient also saw customers dealing with more and more silos of data and with ever-increasing amounts of data attached to nonproductive workloads, Moore said.

"When you step back and think about traditional IT infrastructures, they are extraordinarily complex and extraordinarily inefficient," he said. "If you have 70 percent of your IT infrastructure handling nonproductive workloads, according to IDC and others, it's extremely wasteful."

Fusion marries a full range of storage services, including shapshots, deduplication, WAN optimization, retention policies, encryption, and simple testing of data recovery to the virtually unlimited capacity and robustness of public clouds, Moore said.

Fusion ties customers' existing on-premise primary data infrastructures to such public cloud services as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in such a way to transparently hide the complexity of using the public cloud, he said. In the event of a disaster, customers can have the data along with the applications automatically restored in the cloud for quick recovery to production. They can also search for and recover data, he said.

"We've also added network orchestration to enable customers to re-create their entire network, including which machines are connected to which data, and bring it all up in the right order for quick recovery," Moore said.

Fusion also makes it easy to test disaster recovery plans in what Moore termed a "sandbox environment" without the need to bring production systems down.

Fusion makes it possible for solution providers to step up into midrange and enterprise customers with an easy-to-deploy disaster-recovery-as-a-service solution, said Ryan Lakin, president of IronEdge Group, a Houston-based managed services provider and Axcient channel partner.

"Our market has over the last few years moved to midmarket businesses," Lakin told CRN. "In the past, such larger companies didn't really look at MSPs for services. But we have been shifting upmarket to work with them. They have made a lot of investment in their infrastructure, so we need to look at how to help them implement disaster recovery as a service."

IronEdge's answer is Axcient, which Lakin said can take advantage of the redundant IT infrastructure customers have already built.

"Axcient will help them with it," he said. "Public clouds are now resilient enough for larger businesses to use. Axcient Fusion gives customers the opportunity to leverage both the public cloud and their own on-premises infrastructure. It lets customers eliminate redundant data centers.

"Axcient Fusion lets customers deploy disaster recovery solutions with Amazon or Azure easily," said Lakin. "If departments are looking to reduce data center costs and footprint, they need a wrapper that can leverage what they already have on-premises. Axcient provides that wrapper."

Axcient Fusion is priced primarily based on the number of machines protected by the technology, as well as according to the amount of data protected, Moore said. The fixed price starts at $79 per month. There is no extra charge for handling data in an archive.

"Customers get an easy solution," he said. "They don't need to worry about issues related to pricing predictability."