Single silo in the cloud, looking to mingle: Axcient takes on Cohesity, Actifio

DR-as-a-Service supplier Axcient has extended its offering to provide a single silo in the cloud for five secondary storage workloads, taking on vendors such as Cohesity and Actifio.

Axcient CEO Justin Moore said: “Axcient Fusion [replaces] all non-production IT infrastructure with one elastic, cloud-converged platform. ... we enable every business to run with the resilience and agility of the world’s largest enterprises at one-tenth the cost.”

Axcient claims that with Fusion customers get these benefits:

• Secondary storage consolidation
• 30x reduction in data storage footprint with global data deduplication
• 10x reduction in network and compute requirements
• 30x reduction in data storage footprint with global data deduplication
• 90 per cent reduction in bandwidth consumption with in-line WAN optimization
• Snapshots replicated to the cloud in as fast as 90 seconds
• Less than 60 minutes from catastrophic infrastructure failure to full IT productivity
• One-click, on-demand testing and development environments using real-time data
• Customizable retention policies for regulatory compliance
• Transport and data security with AES-256 key-based encryption

Fusion consolidates non-production IT workloads, such as data protection, business continuity and disaster recovery, test and development, archiving and compliance, data warehousing and analytics into a repository in the cloud; think Cohesity. The single-click provision of test and dev environments populated with real data is similar to Actifio functionlity.

This is a significant software development effort by Axcient; it mentions more than 287,000 development hours and 23 patents are involved. It's probably been helped by the $25m funding round Axcient announced in February 2015.

How soon will it be before incumbent storage suppliers start adding this converged storage use-case functionality to their offerings? With other startups such as Primary Data and Rubrik and also Catalogic pushing this converged storage idea, the concept seems to have legs.

In one way it can be seen as just another set of storage-related data services and, in that sense, they can be viewed as just features to be added to a storage product.

Axcient Fusion is available immediately. There is no pricing information in Axcient's announcement. Find out more at axcient.com/fusion. ®