Axcient x360Recover (formerly BRC) vs Infrascale Platform

• Support - their email support team is top notch. Let me put it this way. I receive an email that a backup failed. I forward to support. I receive the auto-reply in a second and a real response with the hour. They take it from there and fix the issue, run test backups, and confirm with me that the backups are now working properly. Can you ask for more from a support team?
• System upgrades are fully inclusive with your service contract, and they are handled directly by support.
• The device is very stable . It rarely if ever requires a reboot.
• Super easy to run spin-up tests on my virtual servers without affecting the backups - onsite and cloud.
• 24-hour overnight shipping of cloud device if needed/

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• Backups. You can customize the schedule and methods and create real snapshots for your important data.
• White Labeled Software. It has real, effective ransomware protection all managed under one place and one white-labeled piece of software that is easy to use for any MSP.
• Price.

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• We have a 100% failure rate for full-system restores. After our 3rd complete failure, Axcient flew an engineer to our location, they brought along their own BDR with a copy of our off-site data and spent two full days attempting to restore both from the BDR they brought and the BDR in the customer environment - they went home a complete failure.
• Axcient support is singularly focused on supporting their appliance, regardless of consequences to the rest of your environment. They have no problem recommending such things as deleting all shadow copies on a protected system when their software fails to clean up the one that it has created. When investigating issues I have reported to them they have repeatedly kicked off full backups of systems in the middle of the day and let them run until users complain about system performance. They continue to do this despite my increasingly bitter complaints.
• Linux "support" is a significant overstatement. Linux systems can only be backed up through Samba. You cannot do a "full system restore" of a Linux machine, nor can you run it as a virtual machine on the appliance. Being backed up through Samba means file attributes (ex: immutable, append-only, etc.) are lost and only "regular" files can be backed up (forget about device files, fifos, sockets,etc - all of those would need to be recreated manually in a disaster recovery situation). Axcient has no capacity to run pre/post backup commands on the target system, so you cannot directly trigger `flush` or mysqldump or anything else useful in making sure you're getting anything other than a crash-consistent backup of some selected files. Don't fail to realize that this backup method means you'll have to log into your Linux machine through Samba as a user with read permission on all files you intend to back up; Axcient recommends you use "root" (a cardinal sin).
• Backup times are mysterious and impossible to predict. Examples from a single customer environment: A server with 620GB of data (and a high change rate) takes ~6 hours to back up and a server with roughly 90GB of data (and a particularly LOW change rate) takes 9.5 hours. The times for these machines are consistent. These are both virtual machines running on top of ESXi 5.1 with with more than enough RAM,CPU and IOPS dedicated to them. Axcient support simply states that this is normal behavior and we are not to be concerned.
• Everything is slow. 9.5 hours to back up 90GB of data. Offsite transfers consume an inordinate amount of bandwidth compared to competing products we have deployed. My suspicion is that this is at least partially because entire files are being copied instead of changed blocks.
• "Image level" backups aren't actually image level at all. All backups are done at a file level, the "image" backup job type just means it will automatically select all volumes on the target system and get a system state backup as well.
• "Agentless" backup system... has an agent. Scripts and a delightful executable by the name of "axexesvc.exe"are pushed to and executed on each protected windows system for every backup. This "agentless agent" can have all of the same problems that any other agent can have (such as hanging, running forever, consuming all available system resources, etc.), but also brings with it a fairly unique added gaping security flaw. axexesvc.exe is effectively a trojan horse from Axcient, allowing Axcient's employees to remotely execute any arbitrary command or code on any system in your network using the privileges of whatever account you run your backups as (commonly and per Axcient recommendations: a domain admin level user). There are no restrictions on what they can do or when they can do it and there is no logging of their activity. We have had multiple occasions where Axcient's support staff have abused this "back door" to the detriment of our customers production servers.

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• The interface can use a serious update. It's understandable, but not modern.
• I don't like the fact that it forced an upgrade to VMware. That's not something that can be done by every company very easily.
• The restore process can be more intuitive.

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• Better customer service when a user deletes a file and needs it restored
• The return on investment will be seen if a crash/down computer were to come about
• IT efficiency is the goal, to be covered in the event of a server failure

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• Peace of mind: our entire virtual environment is backed up both onsite and offsite
• As stated, it is pricey. Since we haven't needed to do anything more than basic file restores, ROI is hard to measure. A full restore of a virtual server immediately would be priceless. So, on that note, ROI is good.

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