Datacentre black box recorder gets take-off cash
$9m series B funding round
SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
Axxana - the startup manufacturing the Phoenix RP black box data centre data recorder which can withstand a jumbo jet crash - has just received $9m in a funding round to help it take off.
The Phoenix RP hardened box receives real-time data in the data centre and asynchronously replicates it to a remote site for complete data protection, without the need for a synchronous link to the remote disaster recovery (DR) site. A third-party asynch replication product is needed for this and Phoenix RP is integrated with and augments EMC’s RecoverPoint Asynchronous Long Distance Replication.
Axxana was founded in 2005 and has received funding from Moshe Yanai, who either funded or founded deduplication technology company Diligent, and mirrored storage array supplier XIV, both acquired by IBM. Before that, he designed the first Symmetrix array for EMC, and he is currently working at IBM.
Axxana claims its Phoenix RP system is the only product to enable 100 per cent disaster recovery with zero data loss over any distance, for significantly less than the cost of traditional synchronously replicating data mirroring alternatives.
The company received $4m from a B-round in April when its Phoenix RP System product became available. In May it announced a partnership with EMC reseller International Computerware Inc. to market Phoenix in the New England area. A month later Avnet Technology Solutions Mexico, EMC’s largest channel partner in that country, agreed to distribute Phoenix in Mexico.
The new funding round was led by Carmel Ventures, and Ronen Nir, a partner at that firm, joins the Axxana board. The existing investors piled in cash for the round as well.
In May Axxana was said to be working with other storage vendors to have their replication technologies integrated with, or certified with, the Phoenix technology. We don't know which ones have yet.
Nir said: "We are impressed with Axxana’s strong founding team and their achievements so far, including impressive endorsement by leading storage vendors worldwide." Axxana partners can be found here and include HP and Dell.
Eli Efrat, Axxana’s CEO, said: “This round of investment... is a significant validation of our business strategy and product roadmap," hinting at a second product to be released not too far in the future. ®
COMMENTS
About time
I remember having this discussion with the EMC bod over in Cork when they first demonstrated time-ordered asynchronous replication. It was always possible to have remote DR without dataloss at the not inconsiderable costs of having yet another full-sized copy at a building outside the charmingly termed "blast radius" but close enough so that latency was acceptable, synchronously replicating to that and then async to the remote site. Of course if you want this setup to by symmetrical (as you might want with mutual DR) then the remote site also has to have a staging location.
It seemed to me blindingly obvious at the time that what was requires was a black-box that effectively secured all the writes at the staging location, and then passed them on asynchronously to the true DR site and that would only have to be large enough to hold all the write activity that might be expected for the period of time taken to do a true remote replication. Of course you also need to allow enough space to buffer writes to cover outages on the async long distance link (but such activity could be staged to disk store so costs shouldn't be impossibly high). If you don't have such a buffer, then in the event of the loss of the async link, you will trash the integrity of your remote copy and have to resync it adaptively.
You also need the option to mirror the replication, including the staging device, by two paths plus the necessary logic to avoid double-applying at the remote end.
So...
... do we have to anticipate people crashing jumbo jets into data-centres now?
Seems to me that if your data-centre suffers the kind of catastrophic sudden destruction that this appears to be designed to cope with then you probably have bigger problems than losing your data!
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