The Business Recovery Cloud platform gets a refresh of its HPE hardware, updates for the latest IT environments, and a flurry of improvements based on MSP recommendations.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provider Axcient has announced several enhancements to its Business Recovery Cloud platform. They include a refresh of the hardware appliances, expanded support for specific IT environments, and multiple performance and UI updates based on partner requests.

The Business Recovery Cloud platform is Axcient’s legacy offering, aimed at the SMB market, and served through the SMB channel. Axcient Fusion, which was launched last year and is targeted at the midmarket and parts of the enterprise, is engineered for the needs of these markets with hundreds of servers rather than dozens. It is, however, targeted at a very specific customer profile.

“We want people to understand that we are listening to our partners and reacting to them,” said Todd Scallan, Axcient’s Chief Product Officer. “The performance and UI enhancements are based directly on feedback response from MSPs.”

This includes enhancing the virtualization capacities of the platform. More user-facing options have been added for tuning performance of VMs running on the local appliance, including ability to specify the number of cores for each VM and to change the memory and core allocations on VMs that are already running

“We have significant added more flexibility and capacity, to improve image protection,” Scallan said.

The capacity of the compute infrastructure in the Axcient Cloud has also been increased, to accommodate growth in customers, number of servers protected per customer, and size of servers protected. Performance is also increased by optimized resource allocation to enable faster failovers on the local appliance, and by an improved data retention algorithm to optimize performance for larger protection and recovery workloads.

One new feature, a Bare Metal Recovery feature with a modern and intuitive UI and more flexibility for configuring target devices, is still in beta.

“We are really excited about this,” Scallan said. “It’s the only thing in the whole announcement that’s not GA, but it will really modernize the whole process for people who are not 100 per cent virtualized.”

Scallan also highlighted the platform’s enhanced search and improved handling of attachments and deleted objects for Exchange and SQL Server, and the way they streamline granular recovery operations.

“We offer granular capability out of a cold database,” he said. “To my knowledge, we are the only one who provides this natively on our platform, as opposed to using licensed third party products.”

Other new features include new progress feedback on the local appliance UI to provide more insight into granular file recovery, a new appliance uptime indicator to aid in planning periodic maintenance intervals, and a new feature for selectively pruning backup data, to offer more flexibility in storage management.

Axcient announced that the new version of the platform has been certified in several newer environments. They announced support for virtualized environments running VMware ESXi 6.0 and 6.5, and support for systems running Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. The platform now also supports application-aware snapshots and granular recovery for Exchange 2016 and SQL Server 2016, and systems running Windows data deduplication.

Finally Axcient has announced a refresh of its line of hardware appliances

“Our hardware is HPE enterprise class Proliant servers, and this reflects a refresh with the latest microprocessors,” Scallan said.