Datrium, a vendor of hybrid cloud infrastructure, today introduced CloudShift, a SaaS disaster recovery (DR) orchestration service for VMware. The new service is integrated with Datrium DVX, a converged primary and backup data stack for on-premises and public cloud data centers.

Datrium began shipping product in 2016. The vendor’s Datrium DVX, product is an on premises platform that brings compute, storage and virtualization in a single system. What differentiates DVX from traditional hyperconverged systems is that the vendor splits the durable capacity from the I/O and VM performance, according to Craig Nunes, Datrium’s chief marketing officer. Datrium introduced Cloud DVX in November 2017 to provide SaaS backup and recovery services for VMs running in DVX on-premises. The first service runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Datrium’s Brian Biles

“Today, Datrium is extending that SaaS platform with an orchestrator for disaster recovery,” Brian Biles, cofounder and chief product officer at Datrium, told us. “And, because we’re doing this for our own data stack, we can make sure that it works.”

CloudShift revolutionizes hybrid cloud DR infrastructure by focusing on Datriums’s single data stack and providing simple, SaaS-based operation, combining low recovery point objectives (RPO) intervals with low cloud cost. Vendor finger pointing is eliminated, software is always up to date and end-to-end resource health checks assure success. CloudShift will support on-demand hybrid cloud as well as on-premises-only configuration, according to the vendor.

Biles pointed out that VMware vSphere Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is currently one of the top products on the market. “It turns out in that market that it’s a very fragile ecosystem because that [the SRM] approach tries to couple to everything in the data center and there’s a lot of software drift and maintenance problems. So, a lot of times, it just doesn’t work and is known to be failure prone,” he said.

CloudShift provides a single console for resources and runbooks, and is VM-centric, so there are no intermediate artifacts, such as LUNs, to wrangle. “It’s SaaS, so there aren’t a lot of moving parts and it’s a single data stack, so we can test it rigorously to make sure that it works correctly,” Biles said.

“For partners, this new DR capability gives partners another conversation to have with existing or prospective customers,” said Nunes.

Datrium is a 100 percent channel-led company, currently with 200 partners mostly in North America.

Datrium will be running a CloudShift demo at VMWorld conference in Las Vegas, August 26-30^th. The demo is being done in combination with the VMware cloud on AWS. CloudShift SaaS service is expected to be available in the second half of 2019, according to the vendor.

The company has been on a hiring spree. About one month ago, Keith Sannella joined Datrium as vice president channel sales. In June, Tim Page was appointed Chief Executive Officer, in June, and Joe Vranicar was named Chief Revenue Officer, in July.