A lot of people back up their data to the cloud. But how do you back up the cloud itself? Convirture, the company that until now has specialized in cloud and virtualization management solutions, hopes to answer this question with a new backup and disaster recovery solution for the OpenStack open source cloud operating system running on the KVM hypverisor.

The tool, called Convirture Backup, "is a software-based product that provides automated, policy-based backup for OpenStack compute pools and tenants with fast," according to the company. It has a Web-based interface and is designed to work efficiently by minimizing the load on virtual and physical infrastructure, bandwidth usage and storage requirements.

Convirture hopes the product will appeal to enterprises seeking automated backup solutions for OpenStack, a need that Arsalan Farooq, Convirture CEO, called "a major operational gap in the OpenStack ecosystem" that has slowed adoption of OpenStack for production use.

Convirture announced the backup solution Oct. 29 and plans to preview it in a webinar hosted on its website on Nov. 5. The product is slated to be generally available in Q1 2015, and pricing has not yet been announced.

This announcement is a significant expansion of the purview of Convirture, which previously, the company focused on management software for cloud and virtualization infrastructure. It also reflects a growing need for backup and disaster recovery solutions designed for OpenStack, of which there are currently few. And while the current limitation to KVM support in Convirture Backup means it won't work for all OpenStack clouds, the product is nonetheless a major step forward, and could be a sign of more robust and comprehensive solutions to come.