It should come as especially good news for AWS customers shanghaied  by snafus earlier this year at Amazon’s big US-East data center complex. According to Amazon’s post-mortem, the October 22 “event”  started, when “a small number of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes in one of our five Availability Zones in the US-East Region began seeing degraded performance, and in some cases, became ‘stuck’ (i.e. unable to process further I/O requests).”

To be clear, you could move snapshots between availability zones within a given AWS region. And you could move snapshots between AWS regions before, but it required quite a bit of work and usually the use of a third-party technology like Ylastic. It was, in short, a pain. Now, in theory, if customers spread data volumes across regions will be less susceptible to issues in a single data center geography.

Per the forum post:

“EBS Snapshot Copy enables you to copy your EBS snapshots across AWS regions, thus making it easier for you to leverage multiple AWS regions and accelerate your geographical expansion, data center migration and disaster recovery.

EBS Snapshot Copy is simple to use. In the AWS Management Console, you can select the snapshot to be copied, set the destination region, and start the copy. This feature can also be accessed via an EC2 Command Line Interface or an EC2 API as described in the EBS Snapshot Copy page. The copied snapshot behaves the same as other snapshots in the destination region: it can be used to create new EBS volumes which can then be attached  to an EC2 instance in the destination region.

For AWS geeks, this is indeed big news. Said one: “Up until now, we either had to write code or use a service like Ylastic for $50 a month to move volumes between regions. This will greatly simplify cross-region disaster recovery set up for us.”

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Dropbox, Box and other cloud-based backup tools for desktop and mobile devices have already been wildly successful. Similar tools, such as Riverbed, StorSimple and Ctera, are available for the server market, but they take a hardware-centric approach that has failed to garner a large market.

When Amazon Web Services launched AWS Storage Gateway last month, the move seemed entirely logical, almost expected, given the enormous appetite that desktops have shown for cloud-based data sharing and backup.

But is this enough? Most companies have become pretty good at copying data. The real challenge is not restoring data, but going a level higher and recovering services when disaster strikes. That’s particularly important in the era of IT consumerization, where end users expect to access data through applications of their choice on the device of their choice. In other words, it is useless to protect data and not protect the applications that exploit it.

This is where current backup tools fall short. End users are concerned about how long the outage is going to last, not whether the data is safe (which they assume is a given). Disaster recovery is about minimizing downtime. The cloud has huge potential to make an impact here. By managing and scheduling all of the components involved in service delivery, the cloud could turn recovery time objectives into guarantees.

We are at a fork in the road: backup and disaster recovery are going to be two separate processes.

Backup will be used to quickly restore data — including files, mailboxes, attachments and database tables — and to keep auditors happy about long-term data availability.

Disaster recovery will focus on continuity and service recovery, not data restoration. It will orchestrate all of the components involved in service delivery — from storage to hypervisors, operating systems, databases, middleware and applications — across collaborating clouds. This means that when a cloud disappears, another cloud will be ready to take over at the push of a button. And we’ll be 100 percent certain about the maximum outage time. There will be no need to worry about doing disaster recovery exercises, because clouds will do them on their own, continuously and accurately.

Carlos Escapa is the CEO of VirtualSharp Software. Previously, he was a senior executive at VMware in Europe, where he managed VMware’s field operations in France, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Burkett.

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Zerto CEO Ziv Kedem

Zerto, an Israel-based startup focused on providing disaster recovery for virtualized and cloud resources, has closed a $15 million Series B funding round from U.S. Venture Partners, Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners. The company launched at our Structure event in June, and it has now raised $21 million overall.

Zerto tries to take virtualization disaster recovery to the next level by maintaining the state of the primary infrastructure in the backup location. This means that with VMware, for example, Zerto’s software will keep up with VM location changes resulting from the use of vMotion and other tools. For more on Zerto, check out this profile of the company that we published last month, or this video of Zerto CEO Ziv Kedem discussing his company and its product.

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To do this, CEO Ziv Kedem has raised a total of $6.2 million in seed and Series A financing from Greylock Partners and others to build out Zerto. The company will provide its software as a service to cloud providers or enterprise customers needing backup and recovery options for virtualized infrastructure. Zerto does its replication at the hypervisor layer so it can track the virtual machines running on a server, their state and virtual networks, and other elements. It’s also storage-agnostic, so customers can port their data to whatever kind of storage provider (cloud or not) that they want.

The hypervisor-level replication is critical to Zerto’s value proposition, because the product accounts for movement of applications and changes to the state of VMs that first-generation DR products do not. This means VMware users (Zerto only supports VMware for the time being) can utilize dynamic tools such as vMotion, vApps and Distributed Resource Scheduler without fearing their DR strategy won’t be able to keep up with what’s running where.

Here, Kedem discusses the Zerto product with GigaOM’s Derrick Harris:

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Qwest has partnered with Geminaire — the disaster recovery vendor — to supply this service, which will be hosted within a Qwest CyberCenter. The solution will protect email and databases and allow access to content in the event of a server or network disruption.

Currently DR in the cloud is mainly limited to either cloud storage (for example a business may chose to replicate data from their own data center onto cloud storage) or mail archiving (Google, for example, offers archiving and retention for email). The cloud is a natural place for DR to occur for a number of reasons:

1. The inherent flexibility of the cloud means that fundamental load spikes that business continuity services create can easily, and economically, be met.
2. Part of this benefit is seen from the ability to scale by use in the cloud: As disaster recovery is only needed in the event of a disaster, low level preparedness is a natural fit for the cloud.
3. A disaster recovery process that relies on one particular geographical location (an on-premise data center for example) is a risk in the event of a disaster. Having data in the cloud allows for geographical dispersion.

The Qwest offering comes as a DR package including failover, remote operations and real time testing. The key here, however, is a comparison between organizations making their own DR preparations in the cloud via standard storage and a fully packaged offering like this from Qwest. Because disaster recovery is very much an insurance policy, it’s important that it isn’t high cost. The very value that Qwest is offering — feature completeness — could well create a pricing barrier to adoption. At $550 per month on a 3-year contract, users could buy a significant amount of storage on Amazon S3, a bunch of email-archiving licenses, and still have change left over . Time will tell whether businesses consider there to be sufficient value offered by a package deal like Qwest’s. If the relative lack of SMB-focused DR offerings is anything to go buy, this is a very price conscious market.

Whether it’s via an all-in-one provider or from a home-baked storage service, cloud disaster recovery is an important service, having data and applications standing ready to switch on in the event of a disaster is important for business continuity, by providing a fully managed service to allow SMBs to access cloud DR, Qwest is trying to bring this service to a new class of customer.

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Ben Kepes is an independent consultant and contributing writer for GigaOM. Please see his disclosure statement in his bio.