Posts Tagged ‘Communications Line Charges’

What is the ROI of a Fire Extinguisher?

There’s a LinkedIn group called BCMIX – Business Continuity Management Information eXchange. There are over 7,000 members of this group, which I think shows just how important Business Continuity Management is in organizations today.  Members can post questions to the community and get advice from other professionals who are struggling with the same issues.  I’m paraphrasing here, but some of the recent topics were:

• Can you develop a profile for what types of individuals are able to manage disasters?
• How do you determine the RTO for critical systems and applications?
• What is the ROI from a Business Continuity Management Program?

In response to that last question, Peter Morris, who is a Business Continuity Coordinator for Debenhams, wrote something I really liked:

I’m always interested in the calculation of an ROI on an intangible such as a BCM program, because the true value of it, like insurance, is not really calculable until after the event. I mean what is the ROI on a fire extinguisher?

There’s really no ROI on a fire extinguisher until you need it, which, hopefully is never.  But, if you do have a fire, you want the fire extinguisher that works well with the type of fire you have.  There are different types of fires and different types of fire extinguishers for each type of fire. There are also combination fire extinguishers that work with more than one type of fire. For those of you who want a quick tutorial on fires and fire extinguishers, here’s a helpful website: Fire Extinguisher: 101.

Once you’ve decided what risks you want to reduce, then you should get the best possible protection at the lowest possible cost. And that’s where the ROI comes in. Our Phoenix System is like a combination fire extinguisher, because we protect data through a wide variety of disasters: floods, fires, earthquakes, bombings, hurricanes, building collapse. But we have something else going for us. We actually lower the cost of data protection, by reducing data communications costs when replicating data over distance.

Maybe there’s no way to determine the return on a Business Continuity Management plan, but once you’ve made the decision to put a plan in place, you might as well have the best possible coverage at the lowest possible cost.  To help you understand the savings that an Axxana Phoenix System investment can provide, we developed an ROI white paper.  I hope you find it helpful.

Axxana: 100% Relaxed at EMC World 2011

First, a big thank you to everyone who stopped by to see us at EMC World.   Our theme was 100% Relaxed. And while we were very relaxed setting up the booth, we had huge crowds throughout the week, as everyone wanted to visit our Data Lifeguards.

Axxana Data Lifeguards in Action

I hope that they helped you relax just a little.  If we did nothing else, we proved two things:

1. Our lives are filled with series of unexpected events
2. If you prepare properly, you will still be able to relax

Our CEO, Eli Efrat, appeared on The Cube, looking very relaxed, and talked evolution and revolution, the progress that Axxana has made over the past year, Axxana’s ability to augment RecoverPoint, enabling synchronous replication over any distance, reducing peak-load communication costs, and eliminating the need for additional data centers. We help you turn a very small investment into a tremendous financial impact. You can watch a replay of his interview with Dave Vellante of Wikibon here, including a surprise visit by The Stig.

One way that EMC’s customers are trying to relax more is by moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud.  In keeping with that, we have stayed in lockstep with our partner, EMC, by supporting VCE Vblock together with EMC RecoverPoint.  In case you don’t know, VCE Vblocks are the integrated building blocks from VMware, Cisco and EMC, to enable rapid deployments of private clouds. Rick Walsworth, the Director of Product Marketing for EMC’s Infrastructure Management Group and a huge champion for EMC’s RecoverPoint software, appeared on The Cube and talked about the importance of protecting data, when applications are moved into the cloud.  His interview with Dave Vellante  and John Furrier of Silicon Angle is here.

We had hundreds of meetings at EMC World, but we aren’t done getting the message out.  More details to come, but we will be bringing our theme of relaxation to a series of lunch and learn events around the U.S.  I hope to see you at one of our upcoming events.

There are three things every company’s disaster recovery planner should know:

1. The communications costs for the current data replication approach
2. The communications costs when using Axxana’s Phoenix System RP
3. The cost of the Axxana Phoenix System RP

I thought I should share with you at little known secret.  One of Axxana’s first installations of the Phoenix System RP was done at no cost to the customer.  That’s right.  No cost.  And it wasn’t because we gave the customer the system for free.  We didn’t.

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