Startup JetStream Software Inc. is emerging from stealth mode today with a cross-cloud data management platform that it says enables organizations to move workloads between on-premises and cloud platforms with zero downtime and near-real-time replication.

The company is targeting second-tier cloud service providers and organizations that run large private clouds based on VMware Inc.’s virtualization. “Many customers are saying they want to move to the cloud, but what they really want is a VMware environment in the cloud,” said JetStream President Rich Petersen. “We’re addressing the areas where the VMware platform doesn’t work exactly as the customer would want.”

JetStream sees opportunity in the weakness of existing backup and replication software provided by most CSPs, which “was originally designed for single on-premises operations,” Petersen said. That means that when ported to the cloud, the software can’t take advantage of multitenancy and virtual storage provisioning, “so each customer has to be managed individually,” he said. “We aim to bring to market a cloud-first design with same level of recoverability [as on-premises products] but with the dynamics of cloud.”

The platform consists of separate components for migration and performance optimization. The company said JetStream Migrate is the first backup and disaster recovery product to use standard application programming interfaces in VMware environments to enable replication at high speed with minimal impact on application performance. It does so by running as an input/output filter in the vSphere hypervisor. The technology was developed in collaboration with VMware.

The software enables live migration of enterprise virtual machines and their workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud. The replication features make live migration possible even when data is moved on a physical transport device. No snapshots are required, and the fault-tolerant architecture continues replication from the point of interruption. Interdependent VMs can be migrated together and the software forecasts the time required for migration as well as the optimal transport method.

JetStream Accelerate typically increases virtual computing capacity by two to three times and boosts application performance up to fivefold, the company said. It does that by optimizing I/O through low-latency tiering in nonvolatile memory, which is presented as part of the native storage stack

The startup’s three founders have extensive experience in high-performance storage, having previously started FlashSoft Corp., a maker of performance optimization software based upon flash storage, in 2009. FlashSoft was acquired by SanDisk Corp. in 2012. The company said the new product is the result of more than 200 person-years of development.

Pricing wasn’t specified. Petersen said various options will be available to CSPs depending upon whether they license the software for internal use or to deliver as a service to customers.

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