Dan's Take

Disaster Recovery With OneCloud

Backup to Amazon Web Services is good; but what if you use another cloud provider?

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 11/14/2014

Marc Crespi, CEO of OneCloud Software, came by to introduce his company and its product, OneCloud Recovery (OCR). OCR is designed to integrate virtual data centers created on-premise with disaster recovery capabilities in Amazon's Web Services (AWS) to create a Hybrid Cloud environment. Doing this task quickly, reliably and manageably is the challenge OneCloud Software has had to face.

OneCloud's Secret Sauce
The secret sauce, OneCloud Software would say, is its Automated Cloud Engine (ACE), which has the ability to reach into the customer's VMware infrastructure. Here's how the company describes ACE:

OneCloud Recovery fully automates the creation of a virtual data center in AWS, replacing the need for costly secondary data centers filled with redundant infrastructure.

Dan's Take: The Cloud as a Backup Strategy
Enterprises have started to consider building their disaster recovery strategies based on the cloud computing service offerings of their favorite cloud services provider. These providers are offering services that provide backup processing, storage and networking capabilities at a much lower cost than if the enterprise built its own independent backup data center. OneCloud Software is hoping to address this emerging trend with its technology.

The challenge that OneCloud and its competitors, such as Amazon, CloudVelox, Cloudways, Online Tech, Seagate, and even VMware face is that enterprise data centers are really complex. Because of that, providing backup solutions for the x86-based workloads is just not enough. Most major enterprises also have workloads executing on mainframes, single-vendor UNIX systems and on other single-vendor platforms such as IBM I. These workloads are business- and mission-critical, too. Quite a few of the competitors mentioned above only offer solutions for x86-based workloads. That being the case, at best they can be considered partial solutions to the problem of business continuity.

OneCloud is offering some interesting technology and is worthy of consideration. When considering it, though, keep in mind that it doesn't offer a complete solution for diverse data centers or those using a cloud services provider other than Amazon.