OneCloud is a new company (founded in 2013) to solve the problem of backup to public cloud being expensive and complicated. It was founded on 3 major premises (< lol, punny) which are the following:

DR needs to be simple

DR needs to be cost-optimized

A DR solution needs to be complete

These certainly are true premises, and if OneCloud really addresses them well, this product could be major! I’m excited to know more, and I’m especially curious about all the inner workings detailed in the embargoed session! The sad part of not being able to attend in person is having to miss the great relationship building, and the private sessions.

The OneCloud DR platform seems to work about like you would think. On-premises, the OCVA plugs in to vCenter and takes application-consistent snapshots which are then stored on lower-tier storage, compressed, and shipped off to the AWS VPC that OneCloud has created with your AWS credentials. VM’s are protected via protection groups with different RPO settings, etc. Something neat that Eric Shanks caught is that the tool has the ability to resize VMs during failover depending on the type of failover being performed. For example, the VMs can be made half the size of production when initiating a test failover. Alastair discovered that when the production failover is initiated, the tool does NOT initiate shutdown of the production workloads as a part of the “run book.” I totally agree with him that this would be a much desired feature. In a moment of panic, I don’t want to be worrying about whether I’m going to end up with a conflict when a certain workload ends up running on both sides. And lastly, Marco had a brilliant idea – providing some WorkSpaces cloud desktops for administrators to use during the outage. If local site connectivity is an issue, this might be the ticket to the administrators being able to easily continue to manage the environment.

I really enjoyed what I was able to see of OneCloud, and look forward to hearing more as it becomes public info. I’m certainly looking forward to a GA release.