Doyenz is offering an active disaster recovery service in the cloud aimed at recovering a small or medium-sized business in a matter of minutes.

The service also allows a problem-plagued system in a small business data center to do a live failover to the cloud. Another service is oriented toward staging and testing a new production system in the cloud before putting it into service in the business' own data center.

"Once the production image is in the cloud, you can provide a variety of functions in the cloud," said CEO Asutosh Tiwary in an interview.

Low-cost disaster recovery is the lead service that his firm is offering as part of what it calls "the Doyenz ShadowCloud."

In the past, Doyenz has been a Bellevue, Wash., managed service provider, offering expert IT management of customers' computing in its facilities. It's dubbed the third version of its managed service platform as the Shadow Cloud because it can be standing by as a mirror image of a business' production environment that's operated off-premises, said Tiwary.

Doyenz gives small and medium businesses a simple way to upload a copy of their production environment. An agent is loaded onto each data center server; it uploads the server's production image and configurations to a Doyenz data center.

Any changes to the server are uploaded at regular intervals. A copy of the production environment is stored, ready to run upon demand from the customer. If a server or servers fail in a customer's data center, replacements can be started quickly in the cloud, he said.

Tiwary expects the main way Doyenz will offer the ShadowCoud is through value added resellers and system integrators who have direct contact with small and medium businesses.

"If you need to deploy a new application, you can do it in a shadow environment in the cloud," he said. This spares production systems from exposure to an application fault that might bring operations to a halt. If a new application works in a company's mirror image in the ShadowCloud, then it's more likely to integrate smoothly into its production environment.

Tiwary said the cloud services can be applied to both physical and virtualized resources in small business data centers. Doyenz supports VMware's vSphere 4 virtualization infrastructure based on the ESX hypervisor. He said support for Microsoft's Hyper-V will be added in the future.

In addition to running backup and recovery virtual machines in the cloud, the shadow copies can be downloaded from the Doyenz data center to a customer's premises to restart servers there, he noted.

"This is enterprise-grade disaster recovery at one tenth the cost of physical facilities," he said. Pricing will depend on how a VAR or system integrator chooses to present the service. Tiwary suggested pricing in the range of $.75 per gigabyte of production system image per month, but VARs will be required to pay Doyenz a minimum of $750 per month. In most cases that would mean a single VAR would front the services for multiple small business customers.

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