Axcient - a love/hate relationship

I work for a MSP (Managed Service Provider) and we have thousands of clients we support. We are offering the Axcient product as a solution to backup a client's server locally and to the cloud and provide the ability to spin up a virtual machine locally for continuity in case a server is down, restore files, restore entire servers from a crash (bare metal) and also spinning up virtual machines in the cloud for disaster recovery and continuity if users need to work outside of the office.

Our company began using Axcient in 2012. I was brought in from the beginning as bugs were worked out and we created our standard on how to implement the solution. A year later myself and the manager of our Backup dept were flown to Axcient Headquarters to meet the Axcient staff that we worked with every day.

My impression of Axcient is that their solution is heading in the right direction. In the beginning (firmware 3-4) even the basic offsite process took forever and we had to constantly send out DAS devices (Direct Attached Storage) to copy the data from their onsite Linux appliance that all servers backed up data to. Since version 5.0 we have seen significant improvements on offsite speed and version 6.x has been great on onsite/backup copy speed. More improvements are to come that will make this product even better.

They still lack true native VM backup ability like Veeam and therefore every VM acts as it's own server being backed up at the VSS level. Axcient does it's best to keep up with firmware editions but at times they are released prematurely only to find major issues with them. We tend to stay a few versions back. Our company now has a dedicated backup team and Axcient has been our flagship to offer clients.