JetStream Software Inc. today debuted a continuous replication platform for the VMware Inc. vSphere virtualization environment, saying it’s the first data protection product of its kind to be endorsed by VMware.

The company, which was founded by the same team that started FlashSoft Corp., an early maker of flash virtualization software, said JetStream Data Protection goes beyond commonly used snapshots to enable continuous data capture through vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering or VAIO, thus ensuring compatibility with the entire VMware environment. The company also makes products for storage performance improvement, cloud migration and cross-cloud data management.

JetStream said it solves latency problems inherent in intermittent snapshots as well as performance and compatibility issues that frustrate software agents and virtual appliances. Its engineers worked with VMware as a co-design partner for VAIO and the company uses that framework for continuous data capture to eliminate the need for software agents and virtual appliances.

The software is a fully supported under VMware’s Ready program for favored partners. JetStream is targeting cloud service providers, rather than enterprise customers, for this release.

“Because it’s a VMware technology, it’s installed by vSphere and VMware manages the updates,” said Rich Petersen, president and co-founder of JetStream. “It eliminates a lot of the jury-rigging that’s been done to this point.”

The company said use cases include nondisruptive continual data replication to the cloud for recovery and failover, virtual machine failover for the cloud, VM backup to cloud-based stores, policy-based availability for SLA management efficiency and low-latency logging on nonvolatile memory.

The software uses the IO filter to copy a virtual disk to the cloud and kicks off a second process that reconciles the writes with the virtual copy. “We can keep the virtual machine on premises while moving data to the cloud,” Petersen said. JetStream says it can do so without degrading application performance on-premises and can scale to thousands of virtual machines.

Managing large-scale VMware environments with thousands of virtual machines continually writing to disk while moving replication to the cloud “is like having a fire hose of data and a garden hose of connectivity,” Petersen said. “We add a crash-consistent data pipe that’s like strapping 50 garden hoses together. We can send enormous amounts of data to the cloud with the same kind of throughput that’s going on on-premises.”

The technology can write to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3 or any other object store in the cloud. A policy engine assigns priorities on an ongoing basis.

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