Tim Hayes gave a glowing report on the Axxana zero data loss solution during the April 10 Peer Incite. And Wikibon's experts agree. Wikibon CTO David Floyer, who gave Axxana an annual Wikibon CTO Award for its innovative technology, has said publicly that the only thing that surprises him is the market's slow adoption rate of Axxana.
Axxana is so comparatively inexpensive that Hayes said the savings in transmission costs alone can pay for it. This is because a two-data-center synchronous connection has to be sized for the highest possible expected data load. That priced Animal Health International out of the synchronous dual data center market. Axxana allows Animal Health to use a data connection sized for the average data volume by allowing it to hold excess data in the Axxana box until it can be transmitted.
And Axxana is so simple to add to Animal Health's EMC installation that Hayes said it literally was a simple check box in the EMC RecoverPoint solution Animal Health had installed to provide its basic backup and recovery.
So what is the bad news? Axxana only works with RecoverPoint. So while it provides what Hays called a “no brainer” solution for EMC customers, it doesn't help the rest of the companies out there, at least for the present. Wikibon expects Axxana to expand its technology to work with other products eventually. But meanwhile perfectly financially healthy SMBs will continue to go into bankruptcy after a fire destroys their headquarters and their records, both digital and paper. And other companies will be damaged financially by the loss of a few hours of transactional data from their online stores after something as commonplace as a hard drive failure or data corruption requiring a reload of the last backup of the database – typically from the night before on tape.
Action Item: The message for EMC customers is to consider Axxana. Even for those that do not need zero data loss, it solves so many DR problems and saves so much money just by eliminating the need for DR system tests, for instance, that it is worth considering, even for small companies. And customers of competing data storage systems need to push their vendors either to work with Axxana or provide a similar solution. Nightly backups are no longer enough in the age of Internet-based, self-service sales.
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