JetStream leverages their expertise in IO Filters to accelerate data, and following the launch of performance and live migration solutions earlier this year, they are adding a DRaaS offering that they think will be a particularly good fit for the channel.

 JetStream Software launched in April with a next-generation cross-cloud data management platform designed to give VMware cloud service providers [CSPs] and MSPs hyperscaler-like cross-cloud data management capabilities. Out of the gate, they made their JetStream Accelerate for performance available, following shortly by JetStream Migrate, which provides VMware-optimized live migration. Now they have complemented those offerings with JetStream Data Protection, an advanced data availability solution for the enterprise that provides Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service , which addresses what they see as the most common use case for the enterprise cloud. Today, it is available in technology preview.

“This is a part of our policy-based data management solution that is in our long-term vision,” said Rich Petersen, JetStream Software’s president and co-founder. “That longer term vision will have availability, backup and recovery, and policies for other requirements like performance SLAs, cost optimization, data sovereignty and compliance. We will be introducing that it in 2019. This 2018 release is just failover and backup and recovery.”

JetStream’s technology originally came from a a company called FlashSoft, which made Flash virtualization software to increase application performance and virtualization capability. They were acquired by SanDisk in 2012, to provide them with SSD-optimized software, and it was as part of SanDisk, they were selected as a design partner for the VMware IO Filter AP in 2014. FlashSoft was part of the collaboration process in developing VMware’s IO Filters, and in 2015 they released  FlashSoft 4.3 for VMware vSphere 6, the first software certified as VAIO VMware Ready. It now has over 1,000 enterprise deployments.

“That was the key thing, partnering with VMware on the new design framework for the VMware IO Filter API,” Petersen said. “It took years of development work, but our third-party software product that used that API was used to enable solid state memory devices in servers to provide high performance for the underlying storage.”

SanDisk was then acquired by Western Digital, and JetStream was spun out of Western Digital in April.

“IO Filters are extremely important as the industry moves from on-prem to cloud,” Petersen said. “They allow IOs to be intercepted without a performance penalty.” Other vendors use a diverse array of technologies for this, including vSCSCI intercept, VADP Snapshots, VM Agents and Virtual Appliances.

“Some people use snapshots for this, but while snapshots are great for backup, they aren’t for real-time data replication,”Petersen said. “We use IO Filters for acceleration, while most everyone else just uses them for migration.

“We use IO Filters for cross-cloud data management,” Petersen added. “A cloud server on-prem is the staging environment for the replication process and to maintain the replication log. This offloads every function of the replication process to a dedicated hardware environment so host servers aren’t impacted. The crash-consistent data pipe is like 50 garden hoses strapped together. In the cloud, we stage the data, reconcile everything and maintain a coherent and consistent copy of the data that can be spun up in the cloud.”

It’s all managed through vCenter, although because everything is done all in the hypervisor. it will work with any storage architecture and HCI.

“Because we intercept data in a stream, rather than use static snapshots, it requires a completely different paradigm for data replication to the cloud,” Petersen noted. “Some organizations have figured out how to use IO filters, to use appliances to facilitate data replication, and to think about parallel replication of data. We are the first to do all three together.”

“We can not only use this on-prem architecture to enable a cloud-based VMware based failover environment, but can use it to replicate a data-to-cloud based object store,” Petersen said. “It’s much more economical. You can use the cloud-based object store to recover data if you need it, while for less critical data like TestDev, you can transport the data to a cloud-based object store using an S3 adapter.”

JetStream started out selling direct but has been building out a channel of enterprise technology resellers, systems integrators, cloud service providers and MSPs.

“I think this DraaS offering will be a strong channel product,” Petersen said. “As the whole industry moves from a model that has been in place for decade to one in which Cloud Service Providers take a bigger share of the enterprise budget, the channel has to shift to support the CSP as a customer. Most CSPs prefer to do business with us directly, but the exceptions are the enterprise private cloud customers and the hosted cloud people.”

The JetStream Cross-Cloud Data Protection software is in technology preview.