Axcient’s mission in life is efficiency: to stop waste of money, power, capacity and time in IT. It’s dead set on trying to accomplish this.
Market researchers have calculated that the legacy on-premises IT infrastructure market is worth more than $100 billion annually, in terms of replacement goods and services. Axcient, a pioneer in providing disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), believes that a full 70 percent of that total ($70 billion) is simply unnecessary.
Think about it: How many servers, laptops, phones, storage arrays, various components, and software disks or subscription services are you using that are costing you way too much in maintenance, or simply lying around your shop unused? Everybody can identify with that picture.
Axcient’s idea is to connect dots in the data center—including old dots that still work (such as legacy arrays) and new-gen, hybrid-cloud dots that bring new efficiencies that weren’t possible previously.
New Fusion Storage, DR Service Now Out
The Mountain View, Calif.-based storage and DR cloud service provider, which came out June 28 with its new Fusion storage and DR cloud service, had to actually disrupt itself to do this, CEO and founder Justin Moore told eWEEK.
Fusion offers data protection, business continuity and disaster recovery, testing and development, archiving and compliance, and data warehousing and analytics in a single on-demand platform.
“Eight years ago, everyone told us it would be impossible to combine backup, business continuity and disaster recovery into a unified service for our customers, but we did it,” Moore said. “We pioneered what is now being called the disaster recovery as a service market. Now we’re serving up enterprise-class resiliency to more than 5,000 businesses worldwide.”
The disruption came when Axcient decided to widen its purview of the market.
“Our original focus was on small to medium-sized businesses,” Moore said. “But we started to gain the attention of midmarket and enterprise companies who also wanted us to solve their infrastructure challenges. We realized that we had stopped short of an even bigger opportunity: to consolidate not just backup and disaster recovery, but all non-production workloads and infrastructure in a single elastic platform—and to do it for large organizations.
“To answer the needs of those customers, we had to build an entirely new platform, and so we created a parallel engineering group to disrupt ourselves.”
Legacy Infrastructure Gets Expensive to Maintain
Legacy IT architectures often require companies to purchase three, four or sometimes more copies of every piece of software and hardware they deploy to accommodate non-production workloads. This excess investment often sits idle and underutilized, Moore said. In addition to the exorbitant expense of purchasing redundant infrastructure, 80 percent of annual IT budgets go into owning, operating and maintaining data centers, according to IDC.
“The fact is, modern IT architectures are broken, and until things change, IT leaders will continue to be handcuffed by the monumental overhead of non-production IT,” Moore said.
The company’s Fusion cloud service consolidates on-premises siloes of computing, storage, networking and software into a single box and connects them to a hybrid cloud as needed. While they are a step in the right direction, trendy hyper-converged solutions still require IT departments to purchase more hardware and provide and budget for the facilities, power and cooling to operate that hardware.
Axcient, with its new Fusion platform, goes beyond hyper-convergence to “cloud-convergence,” Moore said. This enables enterprises to deploy only one copy of the software and hardware needed to run production IT on premises, and then place all resiliency and agility workloads in the cloud.