This week, JetStream Software, an innovator in cloud-native
disaster recovery, announced that Enterprise Networking Solutions,
Inc. (ENS-Inc), a premier managed services provider
(MSP), is the first to deploy JetStream DR on Cloudian, a cloud-native disaster
recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution built on JetStream DR and Cloudian object storage technologies.
VMblog
was able to catch up today with Rich Petersen, president and co-founder of JetStream
Software; Michael Tso, CEO of Cloudian; and Paul Smitham, president of ENS-Inc,
to discuss the advantages of cloud-native DRaaS, object storage, and the reduction
of infrastructure costs by 60% for MSPs.
VMblog: What do you mean by cloud-native DR and how does it work with DRaaS?
Rich Petersen, President and Co-founder, JetStream
Software:
Our concept of cloud-native DR is to enable service
providers to deliver disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) to enterprise customers
in a manner that works more like other "as-a-service" offerings. For too many customers,
DRaaS has been just as cumbersome, if not more, than traditional on-prem backup
and redundancy. Our approach to DR is to empower the service providers to give their
customers a level of flexibility and ease of consumption that we haven't previously
seen in continuous data protection (CDP) services.
Rather than trying to adapt a software foundation
that was originally designed for on-premises use, JetStream DR is designed from
the ground up to be the foundation for a cloud service. This includes having a higher
level of fault tolerance to support data center-to-data center replication, and
abstracting the DR capability from the datastore, so the service provider's data
center infrastructure is compatible with all their customers' storage platforms.
VMblog: What industries does cloud-native DR hold the greatest opportunity?
Michael Tso, CEO, Cloudian:
We see tremendous opportunities in finance, government
and healthcare because those industries have a significant degree of VMware adoption
and continuous data protection and disaster recovery are critical. In addition,
there is a mature ecosystem of service providers for these industries that have
increasingly moved to a hybrid cloud support model.
At the same time, I wouldn't limit the scope of
the opportunity for cloud-native DRaaS to any specific industries or organizational
size. As a data center platform, VMware is fairly ubiquitous, and expectations are
growing across the board for DR services to continue adding capabilities and delivering
additional cost savings.
VMblog: What do CIOs need to know about cloud-native DR? And what are the benefits?
Rich Petersen, President and Co-founder, JetStream
Software:
For many CIOs, the most common questions they're
asked are, "Is this IT requirement best served from the cloud or on-premises?" and
"Should my team own this exclusively, should it be outsourced entirely, or does
a combination of internal IT management and service provider delivery make the most
sense?" Over the past few years, the answer to that question has been shifting as
managed and assisted DR services have grown more popular.
Cloud-native DR is the next step in that evolution.
It enables companies to achieve business continuity without compromising performance.
Businesses can realize savings by working with a service provider to deliver cost-efficient
DR based on object storage with VM recovery on demand. So today's CIO can meet expectations
for business continuity, with improved cost, productivity and scalability.
VMblog: What are some of the business problems cloud-native DR will solve?
Michael Tso, CEO, Cloudian:
When you're talking about business continuity,
if protection is too expensive or complex, organizations will be forced to make
choices about the extent of protection for different kinds of data. That's clearly
not a good situation, particularly given the strategic role of data. A DR service
based on object storage and maintained by a service provider gives IT organizations
a cost structure that makes those kinds of choices unnecessary.
Additionally, by protecting business infrastructure
at a VM level with object storage, you're able to protect and recover individual
business applications within a single shared platform that's limitlessly scalable
and highly cost-effective.
VMblog: How has object storage impacted cloud-native DR?
Michael Tso, CEO, Cloudian:
Object storage solves the capacity problem with
a limitlessly scalable architecture. In addition, object storage is compatible with
the S3 API - the de facto standard for public and private cloud - and it enables
customers to leverage the cloud at up to 70% less cost than traditional disk- or
tape-based enterprise storage.
VMblog: And for VMware customers, how do they benefit from cloud-native DR?
Rich Petersen, President and Co-founder, JetStream
Software:
VMware customers benefit from the fact that their
environments are largely "software defined." That applies to their DR as well. Our
organization contributed to VMware's development of the vSphere APIs for I/O filtering
(VAIO), which enables data replication in real time directly from vSphere. This
is the key to our ability to provide CDP into an object store. VMs' data are replicated
to the object store at the moment that the data is written in the primary site.
No snapshots, no backup files killing application performance.
The IO filter-based method for data intercept is
just as important for the MSP or CSP introducing the service to their customers,
who will naturally want the assurance that the DR technology they adopt will be
supported by VMware. That's why solutions based on VAIO are certified by VMware.
VMblog: What challenges does cloud-native DR solve for on-premises IT customers?
Paul Smitham, President, ENS-Inc:
Cloud native DR means that the customer's data
center and its systems can be protected dynamically rather than maintaining a parallel
system footprint on similar infrastructure
in our facilities, which is costly and inefficient. Instead, we maintain the customer's
data more efficiently and cost-effectively during normal operations, and the necessary
disaster recovery systems are activated in the event of a declared disaster. JetStream
DR and Cloudian give the on-prem IT customer a choice of platform, a choice of provider,
and a much lower cost.
VMblog: What opportunities does cloud-native DR provide for service providers?
Paul Smitham, President, ENS-Inc:
Cloud native DR gives the service provider the
opportunity to rise up the IT services stack, to move above hosting, archiving,
and so-called "second-tier" services to be the first responder in the event of an
on-premises incident. In addition to the value-add of providing the DR service infrastructure,
these offerings typically include a significant professional services revenue opportunity,
through activities such as business impact analysis, business continuity planning,
and regular testing of the DR plan, in addition to services provided when a disaster
actually strikes.
Fundamental to the scalability and cost efficiency
of the cloud-native DR service is the use of object storage. When replicating data
to the cloud for recovery services, it is not going to a live runtime environment,
but to an object store. If recovery is needed, a vSphere environment is available
on demand. For the vast majority of the time, as systems are operating as expected,
the MSP is not consuming resources unnecessarily.
VMblog: How will we see cloud-native DR evolve?
Rich Petersen, President and Co-founder, JetStream
Software:
In just the past few years, the challenge of data
protection has changed remarkably. The scope of threats has increased to include
malware and ransomware, not to mention the occasional disgruntled employee.
In response to these threats, our product roadmap
includes capabilities for point-in-time recovery, version-based recovery, and delta
recovery:
-
Point-in-time delivers the ability
to navigate forward and backward in time to find the optimal point for recovery,
such as moments before an intrusion occurred.
- Version-based recovery delivers the
ability to spin up the state of the environment at some point in the past, for example,
to recover files that were corrupted or accidentally deleted.
- Delta recovery delivers the ability
to recover only the data that was newly created in the recovery environment. For
example, after a power outage, if the original environment was restored with no
data lost and no data corruption, delta recovery returns only the data created during
the outage in the recovery environment.
VMblog: How does cloud-native DR ensure
data security?
Paul Smitham, President, ENS-Inc:
All data, at rest and in transit, is encrypted
as is the wire that transmits the data. Additionally, we take full advantage of
the security features of Cloudian HyperStore, including secure multi-tenancy, data
spill protection, identity access management, and at-rest and in-flight data encryption.
VMblog: And finally, how does JetStream DR on Cloudian
deliver value to clients? (i.e., velocity, scale, money)
Paul Smitham, President, ENS-Inc:
We were already a Cloudian customer, so when we
learned that we could use JetStream DR to deliver a DRaaS offering based on Cloudian
HyperStore, it made perfect sense to us. JetStream DR on Cloudian enables us to
use our data center resources with greater efficiency and agility than any DR technology
we've used in the past. Just as importantly, it gives us a significant new business
opportunity to develop with technologies that we know and trust.
Compared to other DR/CDP solutions that we've deployed
previously, the infrastructure costs of JetStream DR on Cloudian will be 60 percent
less, which means we can deliver an enterprise-grade DR service to our customers
that's more economical for them to consume and more profitable for us.
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