This week, Axxana updated the analyst community on progress with its Enterprise Data Recording(EDR) product, Phoenix. EDR provides a zero data loss capability at asynchronous distance and uses an airplane flight recorder metaphor to protect the contents of its solution in the event of a disaster.
When Wikibon first informed the community about Axxana, the company had not shipped a product and had not announced any indirect channel customers. This week, Axxana indicated that it is announcing availability of its Phoenix system and integration with EMC's RecoverPoint software.
Users should consider several key points regarding this announcement:
- Axxana's integration with Recoverpoint means EMC customers can economically achieve what previously only the largest data centers, particularly those in the financial services sector, could do with mainframe-class technology; namely provide a near-zero data-loss* solution. Previously this required very expensive, high-end storage, many copies of data and often a third data center.
- Axxana with RecoverPoint integration is reducing the entry point for zero data-loss solutions by an order of magnitude in our opinion. A third data center will cost tens of millions of dollars in equipment, line costs, storage, physical infrastructure, testing, processes, etc. This is typically a very expensive and time consuming proposition.
- We feel this product creates a new disaster recovery market for recovery at a distance without data loss.
Will this eat into EMC's SRDF?
Yes, we believe so, especially in cases where SRDF is overkill today. But over time, we believe that the market Axxana is creating will be much larger than the one that is being threatened.
In our estimate, 20% of application data are candidates for serious disaster recovery - i.e. a recovery point objective (RPO) of minutes or less than 1 hour of lost data. Most of this is addressed through asynchronous replication today.
Synchronous replication and three-data-center solutions are economically feasible for a small portion of all application data (perhaps 1%), although this may account for as much as 5% of all storage spending.
For essentially the same cost of an asynchronous connection, which exposes customers to some data loss, Axxana's solution provides a near-zero data-loss approach. We feel that this announcement and other deals that will follow potentially increase the market potential for near-zero date loss solutions by 3-4X by extending the practical distance between primary and backup sites and lowering costs.
Caveats
Users should be aware of some caveats, namely Axxana is a small, new, unproven startup with a strategy to sell exclusively through indirect channels, including system integrators and storage-systems companies. Axxana currently has no major systems company partners announced and is in the process of building a channel. The main issue for users is the technology has a limited installed base and has not been proven in the the field with happy reference accounts. As such Phoenix is not a technology we would consider ready for prime time. As of this post, Wikibon had only spoken to Axxana customers prior to installation of EDR. The EMC RecoverPoint integration is a good starting point but lacks a public endorsement from EMC. Such an endorsement from a tier-one OEM would be an instant credibility-builder in our view.
Another concern Wikibon has discussed with users is that the EDR solution uses cellular technology to transport data from Axxana's EDR to a remote site. Axxana indicates that the elapsed time of this process is two hours, which we believe will be improved over time. This is an issue because most users have an RTO requirement of four hours or less. Two hours to retrieve data squeezes the RTO window and leaves little room for recovery errors.
To be clear, compared with asynch recovery from a remote site, the Axxana solution, even with this approach, is substantially superior. Users should be aware that testing failover will need to accommodate this two hour window.
The hardest thing to change in disaster recovery is not technology but rather the business and IT processes surrounding recovery. However Axxana offers the opportunity to significantly simplify these processes over time.
The bottom line is that despite these caveats, the ability to deliver zero data loss at asynchronous distance is so simple and economically compelling that users should consider a pilot.
Action Item: Axxana's latest announcement inches forward the concept of zero data-loss at asynchrounous distance. However RecoverPoint users should understand EMC's intentions with respect to this announcement before making any commitment.
Footnotes: *Wikibon uses the term zero data loss and near zero data loss interchangeably. In our view, there is no solution that can 100% guarantee no data loss. Simultaneous outages of multiple components are not independent and more common than classic statistics would suggest.
In our view, Axxana's approach, in concept is the closer to a zero data loss solution than any other system on the market today.