Doyenz Unravels Mysteries of Cloud Computing

Company:

Headquarters: Bellevue, Wash.

Technology Sector: Storage

Key Product: Automated Virtual IT

Year Founded: 2007

Number of Channel Partners: Over 150 in North America

Ideal Channel Partner: Small business-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: Small and midsize businesses typically don't have the expertise to run their own IT infrastructure or take advantage of offsite IT infrastructure, a challenge Doyenz aims to help them overcome.

The Lowdown: For small and midsize businesses looking to explore cloud computing, Doyenz has an answer: Let someone else build and test virtual appliances, deploy them and provide disaster recovery and failover.

That someone else is the customer's solution provider partner, said Ashutosh Tiwary, CEO of startup Doyenz, which provides the technology to help smaller companies take advantage of cloud computing, a paradigm that delivers computing resources as Internet-based services.

The company's Automated Virtual IT platform was designed to help small businesses take advantage of cloud computing. Tiwary called it a hybrid solution that uses virtualization and cloud services to automate the delivery and management of IT infrastructure.

Doyenz's Automated Virtual IT is an end-to-end virtual appliance management platform for disaster recovery, failover to the cloud, and failsafe migrations to the cloud. It lets solution providers and service providers build virtual appliances for customers that can be used for failover, testing and migration, Tiwary said.

Those virtual appliances, which can be built, tested, and deployed in minutes, provide customers with remote disaster recovery and failsafe migrations offsite using any managed hosted infrastructure such as Savvis or Rackspace, without the need for paying for the physical infrastructure. They will eventually be able to be hosted on other sites such as Amazon EC2 or Azure, he said.

Doyenz is not providing the hosting itself because its business model is based on developing the software, Tiwary said. "We believe there are corporations out there building cloud infrastructures at a large scale," he said. "It doesn't make sense for a startup like us to compete."

Doyenz actually builds the virtual appliances necessary for disaster recovery or failsafe migration using the free version of VMware's ESXi server virtualization software. They are configured by Doyenz with customer-specified operating systems and applications.

Actually, two copies of each appliance are configured, with one sitting on the customer's physical server, and the other in the hosted site.

Solution providers then use Doyenz's software to manage those virtual appliances, as well as other virtual appliances created by the customer or the partner.

And because Doyenz's target market is small and midsize businesses, it can build those appliances using either Linux or Windows, Tiwary said. "As far as we know, we're the only company doing custom-built virtual appliances configured with Microsoft Windows," he said.

Customers can access the virtual servers through a Web browser. No additional hardware or software is required, except the physical server on which the local copies of the virtual appliances sit, Tiwary said.

The cost of the service to the customer is equivalent to about one hour per month of the solution provider's consulting fee. Solution providers get recurring revenue, and customers get a fixed cost, Tiwary said.