The local cache, which was always planned as a local complement for D2C, will remove any need for local appliances and truck rolls, by placing a local copy resembling a browser cache on any commodity storage.

Axcient, which makes business availability software for MSPs, has announced enhancements to their flagship x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud solution. The big one is now in beta to Axcient partners, Axcient’s local cache technology. Local cache gives partners a fast, affordable, and reliable way to recover data locally with commodity storage, without the need for a local appliance.

“This is a truly revolutionary thing for the industry, at a time when a lot of backup vendors are still reliant on hardware,” said Ben Nowacky, Senior Vice President of Product at Axcient. “I see the local cache feature as an opportunity to upend an industry, really the first opportunity in my experience to disrupt the industry. We want to help the MSP make backup become a profit centre and not a cost centre. Local cache is disruptive, and changes the way people think about backup.”

MSPs can sign up for the local cache beta trial through their Axcient sales representative.

“With X360Recover D2C, the goal is to make sure we can help protect data however best suits the customer,” Nowacky said. “It can be deployed multiple ways – through an appliance, through private cloud, or direct to cloud. Our goal is how to meet the needs of backup and change the industry so you don’t have to deploy expensive appliances and roll trucks. Our original plan was always with D2C to bring a local cache in as well, in order to make it a true appliance-free replacement. The local cache lets you take any commodity storage and start having a local copy. The cache is not snapshots or recovery points. It’s like your browser’s cache, to give you a way to have a copy of the data locally.”

Having local cache in conjunction with Direct-to-Cloud ensures more efficient management done from the cloud. It also provides for accelerated file and bare metal restores from the local cache, and for automated cache encryption.

Nowacky stressed that the cache is a key part of the evolution of backup.

“We are looking to the future,” he stated. “Three to five years from now, the traditional concept of backup will be irrelevant because the majority of customers will be in the cloud. We all can see that. So if we didn’t evolve, we would be out of business in 3-5 years. There is still a need for everyone to have a continuity solution. Microsoft, AWS, they all still go down. But most continuity providers, especially if they come out of the endpoint world, don’t have the full business continuity stack that we do.”

Apart from the local cache, this release also includes some other capabilities. Pre-configured disaster recovery runbooks, which existed before for the appliance-based solution, are now fully available for X360Recover D2C.

“We have also responded to partner complaints about the number of portals that were needed to sign in and reduced that number,” Nowacky said. “So we made it simpler, and at the same time made things more secure by adding increased security through Single Sign On (SSO) and Multi Factor Authentication.”

Instant virtual export to speed bare metal restores has also been added.

“For most use cases, bringing this to D2C is almost like table stakes, but for some use cases, like a big virtual shop, it is super-valuable,” Nowacky stated.

Nowacky noted that in the relatively short time D2C has been on the market, it has expanded Axcient’s business significantly in some areas.

“By launching D2C at a very competitive price point, we have seen exponential growth in number of workstations being backed up,” he said. “With COVID, protecting these properly has been even harder. We’ve seen a 30x increase in workstation protection because you don’t need a VPN with D2C.”