The ShadowCloud™ Platform
Technology Overview
Doyenz has built cutting-edge Platform-as-a-Service technology to transform the way IT is delivered to the SMB. The Doyenz ShadowCloud™ leverages virtualization, automation, and cloud services to enable unprecedented, powerful, and simple on-premise, hosted, and in-the-cloud capabilities. It offers an incremental pathway to new technologies like virtualization and cloud computing without forcing customers into unwarranted overhauls of their environments. It redefines the level of service that SMB IT can deliver by introducing disruptive and innovative new ways to perform the hardest tasks such as business continuity and migrations. It embraces the SMB IT best practices while augmenting them with enterprise-level technologies.
Click on any of the ShadowCloud services below to learn more.
Cloud Services
Doyenz provides a cloud based platform that delivers a broad set of enterprise-grade IT management capabilities custom tailored to SMB IT requirements. The ShadowCloud platform can safely and efficiently replicate as much or as little of the customer production environment into the cloud. It allows fast and reliable restore of such replicated environments and running them securely in the cloud. It offers an IT professional a choice of performing select operations cheaply and in safety of an isolated environment of a virtual lab in the cloud with the ability to creating and running multiple copies of VMs as needed. The underlying platform infrastructure transparently manages the storage, the running VMs, as well as the communication in and out of them, which allows the user to focus on the task at hand and only specify the requirement for the infrastructure.
Automation
The ShadowCloud provides flexible functionality for building configurable automations that perform routine tasks according to best practices. The automations may create an appliance from scratch or from a template, install and configure an operating system or an application, perform upgrades, migrations, or tests. The Doyenz automation technology encompasses a wide range of techniques, from executing scripts and accessing public APIs to a uniquely robust, patent-pending form of UI automation. Each new OS, application, or operation supported by the Doyenz automation technology is a simple plug-in that encapsulates target-specific knowledge, such as requirements needed to drive the automated operations, best practices on configuring them, and steps needed to perform them. That simple plug-and-play capability allows Doyenz to easily deliver new and custom automations, and in the future, will allow partners to create their own.
Virtualization
Virtualization is a proven technology that has been in use in large enterprises for years and recently became a standard part of operating system platforms for servers of all sizes. Doyenz leverages virtualization as part of its cloud solution to offer flexible, safe, and high performance environment, in which customers can restore their backed up servers in case or disaster or for test purposes, to run their production systems in case failover is needed, and to use as a virtual lab in the cloud for migrations, upgrades, and tests. Doyenz has built sophisticated storage, lab, and networking infrastructure to provide unmatched security, performance, and feature set for storing and running virtual machines. Doyenz supports ESX virtual machines directly from the customers’ production environments but it also allows its customers to benefit from the virtualization without requiring them to virtualize their production systems. Instead, a physical machine may be replicated into the Doyenz ShadowCloud and virtualized there with access to all platform services seamlessly. That way, Doyenz ShadowCloud is a hybrid solution that blends physical and virtual and allows customers to migration from the former to the latter safely, incrementally, and according to their own schedule and priorities.
Platform Features and Functionality
ShadowCloud Agent
The ShadowCloud installs a small agent on the client’s server. This agent provides a secure and efficient mechanism for moving all the data to and from the production servers and the cloud. The agent also provides command and control capabilities for backup, restore, and provisioning of machines at client sites. The agent uses advanced encryption and compression technologies to offer best-of-breed balance of performance and security. It accepts no in-bound connections and initiates all outbound connections only to the Doyenz data center to further reduce security risks. There are two types of Doyenz agents: one for VMWare ESX servers and one for Windows OS. The former is an ESX virtual machine and can manage multiple Windows virtual machines at the same time. The latter installs as a Windows service and can deliver Doyenz capabilities to Windows installed on physical machines or other hypervisors than ESX, e.g., Hyper-V.
ShadowCloud Rapid Recovery and Failover™
Unlike other disaster recovery solutions that backup client’s data in the cloud where they sit and gather dust, the ShadowCloud high availability service can replicate all or parts of the client’s entire production environment and run it without reconfiguration in the ShadowCloud Virtual Sandbox for testing, modifications, migrations, and failover. The high availability solution uses the Doyenz agent to detect changes to the client’s production servers (physical or virtual), compress and encrypt these changes, and then replicate them to the Doyenz ShadowCloud. A history of the latest server images, based on retention policies selected by the client, is maintained to the cloud. At any point of time, the partner can choose to restore a specific image to a VM and then run it in the virtual sandbox. The sophisticated controls allow running multiple such VMs together on a single isolated network and to control external connectivity to and from the VMs. Once the production environment has been repaired, the failover servers’ images can be incrementally downloaded to the environment without disrupting the operations in the cloud and with minimal downtime for the final failback.
Shadowcloud Sandbox™
It is a common misconception that it is easy to create, and start a copy of a virtual appliance running in production. Depending on the size of the virtual appliance, making a copy can take hours, and starting that copy often creates network conflicts which can only be avoided by making significant modifications to the virtual machine. The Doyenz Virtual Sandbox provides an up-to-date copy of the production server as a virtual machine in a virtual lab environment. The sophisticated Doyenz back-end storage technology allows you to make copies of virtual machines and start them up in minutes inside the “fenced network” of the virtual lab without making any changes to the copy of the VM running in production. The fenced network allows full control over ports for access in and out of this network. The fenced network also allows you to start multiple independent VMs or multiple copies of the same VM at the same time in their own independent networks and connect these networks together, if needed. Combined together, these capabilities provide our partners a full virtual sandbox-in-the-cloud for making or testing changes, upgrades against a full copy of the client’s production servers.
ShadowCloud Migrations™
Migrations are difficult, require significant time and considerable expertise, and involve significant downtime and business risk for the client. Furthermore, in the event of an error or failure, recovery can be even more difficult and create significant client dissatisfaction. The ShadowCloud Migration service allows our partners to perform full end-to-end safe migrations in the cloud with minimal risk and downtime to the client. The partner can restore the latest copy of the client’s server from the backups into the ShadowCloud Virtual Sandbox. They can automatically or manually prepare the source server for the migration and using automation to create a new target server. The partner can then connect the two servers together in the same fenced network and perform the full migration. A user can use the Doyenz automated migration process as well as manually follow their own methodology or use third-party migration tools to perform other automated migrations. They can also collaborate with experts by sharing access to the server in the virtual lab to diagnose problems. Since the entire process is performed while the client continues to run on the old server in production, in case the migration fails or has issues, partners can resolve these problems on their own schedule and redo the migrations if necessary without any impact on their clients. Once the migration is completed, the migrated server can be downloaded and easily synchronized with all the changes that happened in production while the migration was being performed. Doyenz currently supports automated migrations for Windows Small Business Server 2003 to 2008, and is building migration solutions for other Windows environments like Share Point, Exchange, etc.