Axcient Adds Business Continuity to Data Protection Service

Axcient Inc., the provider of the Axcient data protection and business continuity platform, purpose-built for managed service providers (MSPs) and IT administrators to serve their small to medium-sized business (SMB) customers, today announced the release of ServerAlive. With ServerAlive, Axcient unifies backup, business continuity and disaster recovery on a single platform. The ServerAlive option on the Axcient appliance is now available in North America. The company provides three bundled service plans across five different sized appliances to its managed service provider partners depending on the customer's needs. Axcient partner plans start at $119 per month. 

The company said ServerAlive helps enable MSPs and IT administrators to launch a virtual instance of a customer's failed server on the Axcient local appliance in a matter of minutes. ServerAlive can be activated remotely with a single click through a Web browser, so MSPs and IT administrators can ensure their customers' servers and applications continue running even when they're not onsite. Then, when new hardware arrives, the ServerAlive instance can be migrated back to the new server.

"Axcient has leveraged practical cloud computing and virtualization to offer a truly integrated solution for total data protection for small and medium businesses," said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "For a young company to offer this level of integration and sophistication is extremely impressive."

With ServerAlive, customers can take complete disk images of Windows 2003 and 2008 servers, launch a virtualized instance of a server on the Axcient appliance if the original protected server goes down, Bare-Metal Restore (BMR) to new hardware and provide Microsoft Exchange brick-level restore down to a mailbox, single email, calendar or contact.

"In my 30 plus years in IT this is the cleanest rollout by a vendor I have ever seen and it went exactly as promised. In my opinion, I think ServerAlive is a total game changer," said Ken Segal, President, 24/7 Network Solutions, Inc. "We're covered from laptops to servers to bare-metal restore. I know my SMB customers will love this solution."

Justin Moore, founder and CEO of Axcient, said backup, business continuity and disaster recovery have traditionally been treated as separate technologies within the data protection industry. As a result, he said, building a comprehensive data protection solution has historically required working with three or more vendors. “When you think about the complexity and expense associated with this, it is no wonder that so many businesses don't even backup their data and that employees of SMB companies experience so much downtime in an average year," he said. "With the release of ServerAlive, Axcient is the first company to unify all three components of data protection. Now, small and mid-sized businesses can experience enterprise-like uptime from one vendor, with one solution, all delivered as a service."