The challenge that SMBs face is they have a business to run. They need a solution that just works. If there is a dedicated IT person, they are often busy wearing ten other hats and don’t have time to become an expert in backup setup, configuration and monitoring. In other words, a solution targeted at the SMB should plug in and work the first time. The Axcient Appliance with its tether to the Axcient Cloud, more than meets this requirement. Within about 15 minutes of receiving the unit we were able to connect the unit to our network and start initial backups. Within the first hour we had backups started on all the systems in our lab. Within the first day those backups were replicated off-site to Axcient’s Data Center. In short, within a day the lab was totally protected from either a system or entire building failure. What Axcient has achieved with its appliances is essentially making the entire backup and disaster recovery process available to the busiest of small businesses. It’s as close to a plug and play experience that you are going to find in backup and DR.



Setup


Setup of the unit is easy. After taking the unit out of the box, powering it up and providing connectivity to our network, we gave it an IP address. From there we went to the devices screen and added clients. This can be done via the machine name or IP address. In this lab we leverage Parallels Server for Mac to generate extra clients and OSs but we also have additional stand-alone systems. All systems were added to the environment with relative ease.

George Crump, Senior Analyst

Also, by the time you read this, Axcient will have released a version to do an image-level backup that will further improve full-server recovery. Axcient will at the same time be able to deliver full-server failover to its Appliance as well. This means that if you have a server crash, the Axcient Appliance will be able to run a virtual instance of the fallen server until it can be replaced. This can be a HUGE advantage in a small business that can’t justify the expense to have idle machines on standby in case of a server failure.

Lab Report

Adding a device or client is simple. In the devices menu clicking on the “add a device” button brings up the device configuration screen. Here, enter the IP address and administrative information for the system your are adding. Once the device is added you are taken to a device summary screen.

 
 

Selecting one of these devices will then take you to a screen that allows you to create jobs to back up file systems, applications or entire servers. This is where there is an important differentiation from a hybrid based cloud backup and cloud-only backup. When using cloud-only backups you typically don’t want to back up your whole server because recovery of that server through the internet is impractical. Hybrid cloud backup on the other hand makes this is very much a reality since most of your recoveries will typically come from the local Axcient appliance.

Once the server or file has been selected the next step is to assign it a schedule. Here the Axcient Appliance has all the options you would expect in a backup application.

Certainly, there will be cases where you want to back up certain directories or just the application. In these instances selecting those directories is straightforward. To select a server or its folders to be protected you click on the box next to it. We selected documents and settings of a Windows Server in this example. The solid square around the “Documents and Setting” folder means that it will back it up and automatically off-site the data. You also have the option to only back up and not off-site the data that would be represented by a half box.

 

Notice we made no mention of installing something on a client or server. The Axcient Appliance is an agent-less backup technology. This not only makes installation easier but also makes the day-to-day backup process more reliable. This sort of backup is also ideal for small, virtualized environments like the one Storage Switzerland has in our lab. We can back up via guest OS backup without impacting performance of the virtual machine or the virtual host.

The performance of the restore request was excellent and navigating to the file you wanted to recover was simple and straightforward. Most importantly, all the data that was recovered was readable and useable. Again, impact on performance of the recovery target was minimal and for most users would not be noticeable.



Storage Switzerland’s Take


As stated earlier, small businesses want backup and DR to ‘just work’ so they can get back to running their businesses. The Axcient Appliance delivers on all aspects of this and supplies reliable restores. Combine these capabilities with the upcoming ability of standing in for a fallen server and small business can finally tackle DR.

Backing Up


Once the clients have been added and schedules set, the backup process just executes. To build up a backup history quickly we set most of our jobs to run every hour.  Performance to the unit was excellent and we were not able to measure or notice a performance impact of those clients while the backup was occurring. This also included negligible performance impact on our virtualization host while having multiple simultaneous backups occurring on the various virtual machines. Part of this is a credit to Axcient’s agent-less technology and because once the full backup is completed the Axcient Appliance only needs to perform incremental backups of the servers. As a result those subsequent backups happen very quickly.


The main dashboard provides complete information of what is happening during each backup job and how the combined backup jobs are affecting the appliance.


As you can see from the screen shot, despite loading the appliance up with several jobs we were never really able to push its performance. As a result we think the Appliance will scale to meet the needs of many growing small to medium sized businesses.


The dashboard also gives you the status of the off-site replication activity to Axcient’s Data Center. In the event that the local appliance has failed for some reason, you still have access to all your data because of the Axcient Appliance’s intelligent use of cloud storage.

 
 

The progress of the restore jobs are documented on the events tab of the dashboard as seen below:

Restores


At the end of the day backup is all about recovery. Multiple restores worked just fine from the Axcient Appliance. We were able to search by file name or browse by directory to find the files that we needed to recover. The search by names came up very quickly. You can also browse by backup date to capture a specific version of a file as shown in the screen shot below.

 
 

Axcient Data is not a client of Storage Switzerland