Vision Solutions has unveiled a version of its Double-Take replication and disaster recovery technology that can be operated as a cloud-based service.

Available immediately, Vision’s Double-Take Cloud Protection and Recovery (CP&R) CloudStack Edition is aimed primarily at service providers in the first instance, enabling them to offer customers a cloud-hosted disaster recovery service.

Vision said it already has one UK-based service provider, Pertechtual, signed up to deliver recovery-as-a-service to business customers using the platform. But that firms can also deploy the service inside their own on-premise private cloud environment, if required, it added.

“Virtualisation is already used for both production systems and disaster recovery, and cloud is set to follow the same trend,” Ian Masters, Vision Solutions sales director for Northern Europe told V3.

Masters said he expects the next logical step will be for companies to adopt the cloud for disaster recovery, rather than moving their entire production environment to the cloud.

The Double-Take CP&R CloudStack Edition integrates with the open-source Apache CloudStack or Citrix CloudPlatform frameworks, enabling service providers to deliver a self-service disaster recovery tool with a pay-per-use pricing model to their customers.

Vision’s technology performs a synchronous, real-time byte-level replication of servers, capturing changes as they happen and sending it across the internet to the repository to provide an up-to-the minute replica of the systems being protected.

The availability of this cloud-based replica allows customers to do a rapid recovery should disaster strike, but it could also be used for cloud migrations, according to Masters.

“It presents customers with a fantastic opportunity to use the same technology to migrate their production infrastructure to the cloud, if they wish. Then you can turn the solution around and re-purpose your on-premise infrastructure as the disaster recovery target,” he said.

Vision Solutions also announced a Double-Take SDK that now provides application programming interfaces (APIs). This enables service providers or enterprise firms to integrate its disaster recovery, high availability or migration tools into their management system or cloud orchestration platform.

As part of the same move, Vision said it was allowing service providers to consume licences for its Double-Take and MIMIX tools under a metered usage scheme.

MIMIX is Vision’s line of high availability and disaster recovery tools aimed at users of IBM”s iSeries systems.