Axcient Launches Virtual Appliance for VMWare Environment Backups

Cloud-based recovery-as-a-service provider Axcient this week announced that it is expanding its offerings with a virtual appliance that lets organizations protect data locally and replicate it to the cloud without buying new onsite hardware.

Axcient’s physical appliance is a cornerstone of the company’s core architecture, but the new virtual appliance opens up many new possibilities for partners and customers, according to CEO Justin Moore.

The virtual appliance enables MSPs to host infrastructure for large customers. On the smaller side, it can help eliminate capital expenditures for smaller customers. 

Moore told MSPmentor that the virtual appliance is on feature and performance parity with the physical appliance, but it offers greater flexibility and it can reduce startup costs.

“You can do it all,” he said. “It’s a software-only version of the Axcient hardware appliance.”

The appliance runs on VMware (VMW) virtual infrastructure, letting customers and partners leverage existing investments in hardware by repurposing what they already have on hand. Axcient is launching with VMware support first because of the virtualization company’s leadership position. However, Axcient expects to add support for other hypervisors starting in the next 3 to 6 months.

Axcient said that the virtual appliance enables MSPs to recover and failover point-in-time snapshots of files, databases, applications and servers both locally and from the cloud, eliminating data loss and business down time.

In addition, the appliance enables protection of both private and public cloud environments, providing multi-tenant protection of disparate server clusters under one recovery-as-a-service cloud, Axcient said.

The virtual appliance can scale to environments up to 20 terabytes per virtual machine.

Moore said the following are two primary use cases for the virtual appliance:

1. The customer already has a VMware environment and has done a virtual consolidation. Workloads are virtualized across the business, and the MSP can manage this customer’s infrastructure remotely.
2. The customer has an unused hardware asset. The MSP could download VMware’s free hypervisor, install it on that server and then add the Axcient virtual appliance.

Moore said the introduction of the virtual appliance has created new flexibility for MSPs. Previously if MSPs and cloud service providers had hosted customer data centers for 100 customers, they would have had to buy 100 physical appliances and sync those with the Axcient cloud. Now they can save on the hardware costs and host the virtual appliances on their own infrastructures.

“If they were to go with physical hardware, they would spend between $1,500 and $15,000 on a piece of hardware up front,” Moore said. “You can eliminate that for every customer.”

Are there customers out there who would not benefit from a virtual appliance? Moore said that for those customers who do not have a virtual infrastructure or existing virtual environment, a dedicated appliance makes more sense. But so many customers have moved to virtualize at least some of their IT.

“This lowers the bar even further from a cost perspective,” Moore said. “We are seeing MSPs increase their margins by 30 percent. It’s a huge cost savings up front and it can be deployed in minutes.”