NaviSite customers leveraging NaviCloud Director can now replicate their virtual machines between separate locations and environments.

The cloud services company this week said its NaviCloud Director platform now uses virtualization to simplify the process of moving workloads from one geographic location to another for either load balancing or disaster recovery purposes.

“NaviSite’s NaviCloud Director has been designed to support integration with existing customer environments at the hypervisor — by supporting VMware, the most common private cloud platform — and management, through publicly accessible APIs levels, but did not have a simple solution for moving the workloads back and forth,” said Chris Patterson, senior director of product management at the Andover, Massachusetts-based NaviSite. “By implementing this technology, customers have a much easier path towards a private-public cloud hybrid.”

NaviSite’s new replication solution leverages disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) technology developed by Zerto, a Boston-based business continuity and disaster recovery solutions provider that focuses its efforts on virtualized infrastructure on cloud.

“Everyone likes the idea of bursting an application to the cloud, but the reality of synchronizing terabytes of data and maintaining network configurations between multiple sites has always made application mobility difficult to achieve,” he said. “By utilizing the Zerto platform, all of that complexity is addressed and the customer can go back to focusing on business needs, not configuration nuances.”

Patterson told Talkin’ Cloud that these platform enhancements also benefit channel partners by enabling them to bring the cloud to customers who have already made investments in their on-premise environments.

“By presenting cloud as an enhancement of current environments instead of a replacement, channel partners can continue with traditional models of selling local hardware and services but have an easy solution for off-site use cases as well,” he said.

According to Patterson, NaviSite has plans to turn its focus toward management services by taking the same approach it had taken with building out its infrastructure.

“Just as many customers want a hybrid model for infrastructure, they want that same type of flexibility in the support of the VMs as well,” he said. “NaviSite has hundreds of engineers and architects with expertise ranging from operating systems to databases to complex applications, and we want to provide that expertise to our customers in the same dynamic way we provide infrastructure.”

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