A year and a week after emerging from stealth, data migration software developer JetStream Software Inc. is entering the data protection market with a service that backs up entire virtual machine images to on-premises infrastructure, the cloud or a combination.

JetStream is aiming the service at cloud service providers and managed service providers who will resell it to their customers. JetStream DR provides a combination of data replication and “warm” failover that enables rapid recovery from outages and unexpected conditions such as cyberattacks.

It uses a technique similar to snapshotting, which captures an image of a system’s state at a particular point in time, but without some of the downsides, said Rich Petersen, president and co-founder of JetStream. Specifically, snapshots use a technique called change-block tracking, which captures only elements of the environment that have changed since the last snapshot was taken.

The intent is to minimize the impact on performance, but the result is that rebuilding VM images from multiple snapshots can be a chore, Petersen said. “If you need a complete picture of the last state of your drive you have to stitch those deltas together,” he said.

JetStream DR continuously captures and replicates data as it’s written to local storage using VMware Inc.’s vSphere APIs for IO Filtering, a framework that third-party developers can use to intercept input/output requests from a guest operating system to a virtual disk. The result is that the recovery point objective —  or the age of files that must be recovered from backup in order to resume normal operations – is nearly zero, the company said.

By using replication rather than snapshots, JetStream said it can capture more data and enable faster recovery times. Using VMware’s IO Filter nearly eliminates the impact on performance and gives service providers the peace of mind of VMware support, Petersen said.

Also, because VMware’s IO Filter runs within the hypervisor, the JetStream software will work across any environment that runs VMware, Peterson said. “Hyperconverged infrastructure vendors say they have a solution for continuous data replication as long as the environment on premises and in the cloud are from the same vendor,” he said. “For a service provider, that’s a little less than ideal.”

For critical workloads, virtual machines can fail over to a continuously available, or “warm” VMware recovery environment for the fastest restore times. Less critical workloads can be continuously replicated to an Amazon Web Services Inc. S3-compatible object store. The VM and data stored in the object store can then by “rehydrated” —  or reconstituted for transfer to the live environment — from S3. “This takes a little longer than a failover to a live VM environment, but you don’t have to maintain an idle VM 24 by 7,” Petersen said.

JetStream is one of a new breed of data protection providers that are developing backup and recovery software specifically for use with virtual machines and cloud infrastructure.  Competitors Veeam Software Corp. and Rubrik Inc. have together raised more than $1 billion in financing. The privately held JetStream hasn’t yet raised venture capital. Its founders previously started FlashSoft Corp., which was acquired by SanDisk Corp. in 2012.

Image: JetStream Software