Just over a century ago, a complete transformation occurred in the transportation industry. Prior to the year 1908, individuals and families traveled from place to place by horse and buggy, by street car, by train, or by ship.  Each transportation option had significant limitations. The street cars and buggies limited the distance a person could reasonably travel.  Trains and ships were expensive and offered limited destinations. Hand-crafted automobiles offered more flexibility and greater distance, but were affordable by only the wealthiest individuals, being costly to acquire and difficult to maintain. In 1908, the Ford Motor Company began mass production of the Ford Model T, making what Henry Ford called, “a car for the great multitude…so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one…” It wasn’t the abundance of resources that drove the innovation in automobile making, but rather scarcity.

It’s no different in the world of data protection and disaster recovery. Prior to Axxana, zero-data-loss disaster recovery solutions were available.  All you needed was a great deal of money and a willingness to accept lots of restrictions on where your data centers could be located or a willingness to accept transaction latency that would be deemed intolerable by most organizations. But as Craig Stewart (also know as VirtualPro), wrote after being introduced to Axxana:

You utilise Axxana so you don’t have to do expensive synchronous replication, so you don’t have to introduce unnecessary application latency, so you don’t have to have that second site within ~100KM distances.  The reason this product is built to withstand every feasible disaster is so that you can safely use cheaper asynchronous replication over large distance and still guarantee that synchronous replication RPO that the business or application owner demands.

I swear one of those imaginary light bulbs went on above my head while I was discussing it!