ANTenna Blog -- Storage

The startup offers a hybrid on-premesis/cloud approach to backup, archiving, and disaster recovery for companies in the "underserved" market between SOHO outfits and the enterprise.

Axcient founder Justin Moore says it was his own data loss experience that led him to start the company. "It took a couple weeks," he says, "and I only got back 75% of my data."

Data protection in SMBs is a "management nightmare," Moore says, typically relying on agent-based systems that have to be installed on each server, and "save-to-server" policies that are rarely followed by end users.

Axcient's appliance is totally agentless, running its own Linux-based operating system to automatically back up and protect servers and desktop and laptop workstations. The idea, Moore says, is to offer an "easy and intuitive app to centralize and virtualize management of the data protection environment." Whew!

In practice, that means a single console where you can automatically discover and manage devices using a variety of protocols, and select protection levels for any group of them. (Service providers can do this remotely for their clients from a single "global" console.)

The Axcient Dashboard.

This Web-accessible console is run off of an onsite appliance that allows for faster recovery from any problems. Just as important, the end-to-end approach gives SMBs "one throat to choke" if anything goes wrong, Moore said. The backup and recover industry has been overcomplicated. It doesn't need to be that complicated."

Pricing for a 500GB system (with 25GB of off-site backup) runs less than $100 per month, while installations backing up "really huge amounts of data" could incur fees of up to several thousand dollars per month. The system is designed for companies with 1 - 500 workstations.

Axcient has been working with resellers in stealth beta for a while, Moore said, and has already acquired several hundred customers. The service is initially being marketed to small and midsize companies with "very valuable" data, including the financial, healthcare, and legal industries, as well as creative services companies like designers, architects, and engineers.

Later this year, Axcient plans to introduce Server Alive Technology that would store images of key servers on the appliance, and in the event of a massive hardware failure, actually run applications off the appliance until a fix is installed.