Axcient Data Center Upgrades: What You Need To Know
Written by Thomas Gouverneur
Over the last year, the Axcient Cloud Engineering team has made a number of big changes to our data center. These upgrades have strengthened our cloud and increased our capability to support our clients’ data. We sat down with VP of Cloud Engineering, Thomas Gouverneur, to get the exciting details on what specific upgrades were made and what this means for our Partners.
What specifically happened in terms of the technical improvement?
Among the changes we made this year, we increased the network capacity by a 2x factor, which allows an increased amount of data to flow to our data center. We also increased the overall upload speed our partners can expect when sending their data to us, given their bandwidth permits. We made the upgrades to our data center with scalability in mind, our new platform will allow us to make smooth and transparent increases without impacting our data services.
In 2018, we had a unique opportunity to start the implementation of new products and infrastructure completely from scratch. The infrastructure changes and improvements we have implemented this year would be too long to list, but the generally speaking the changes encompass the following: data center power management, cooling systems, physical security of our equipment, shipping/receiving processes, overall equipment density, redundancy, network capacity, and more.
When did the changes take place and have they already gone into effect?
As of late February 2019, all of the changes we’ve made have been fully implemented. Along the road to complete this project, we hit two major milestones. The first, was in July of 2018, when all of the previous data center equipment was migrated to our new facility, taking advantage of the many physical improvements we made. The second milestone, was when we moved every single customer out of the old Axcient data center in San Jose, California.
Will our partners see a difference?
Yes and No.
No, for those partners that are not able to take advantage of the increased bandwidth available, or for those partners that don’t use BRC product, the changes implemented may have been perceived as transparent.
Yes, all of our BRC partners are now experiencing a more robust storage design and better performance when it comes to off-sites and cloud recovery. We had really good feedback from the BRC customers, in some case, off-sites were taking as much as half the time. Cloud recovery boot times have been reduced by factor of 4x!
Again, the difference we’ve made this year is in the details, so overall, we hope that, even if partners do not notice a drastic difference, they will all benefit from the changes we’ve made.
What is the big takeaway here? Is there a big return on investment for Axcient or our partners?
The biggest takeaway is about the future of our cloud! Our data center is ready for the big challenges on the horizon, but more importantly all the new challenges our partners and their customers require of us.