Axion has a unique, appliance-based approach to backup.
Inside the Linux-based appliance, which comes outfitted with 1.5TB of storage space and supplies 5 data protection, is the Axion application, complete with its own filing system.
Axion uses single-instance storage to conserve space among all of the clients that use the appliance for backup and restoration. The appliance approach does speed up restorations, because all storage is in-line.
Clients access the Axion appliance to download client-side backup applications specific to their operating system.
Axion’s backups are both incremental (changed files) and system snapshots. Axion supports Microsoft Windows (NT and later), Linux (Red Hat versions 7.3 and 7.4 and SUSE SLES versions 8 and 9), Solaris (versions 7 to 10), HP-UX (versions 11 and 11i) and AIX (versions 5.1 to 5.3) — but not Mac OS X. A Java client for each version is also downloadable.
The files in Axion’s server appliance are stored within a proprietary filing system called Avamar File System (AvFS), which provides indexing and a rapid-search engine. The indexing takes place according to a schedule, rather than in real time.
AvFS can be searched Google-style with search strings, letting a full backup database be searched easily and randomly for security or other reasons.
The Web interface that runs Axion doesn’t support the Firefox browser fully (a plug-in must be added in versions 1.5 and 2.0) and doesn’t support browsers based on KDE (Konqueror) and Apple Safari, making it difficult to use for certain Linux and Apple clients. We had the best success with Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7.
Although Axion doesn’t perform bare-metal restoration, it conducts rapid restoration once a machine establishes connectivity. It does this by knowing a machine’s total file-history delta and then restores on demand only the files it knows have changed. This unique method assesses the current state of a client needing restoration, compares it with a file history of the client and restores only the files that differ between the current and desired state of the machine.
On the security front, Axion offers proprietary or 128-bit encryption for data transmissions, and has in place user-access control to stored data.
Logging is available through a command-line interface. There is also good reporting support in the administrative GUI that provides such pertinent information as a listing of client activity in a specified period.
We liked the appliance method used by Axion and found it to be useful if immature compared with the features of the other backup products we tested. A downside is that larger enterprises may well use numerous appliances, even if they can be added in a modular fashion.
