RackWare migration, disaster recovery, and backup

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RackWare migration, disaster recovery, and backup
RackWare was founded in 2009 in Santa Clara, CA, by CTO Todd Matters, with a vision of building a migration and DR product that provided customers with a consistent data approach while extending flexibility in supporting any target environment. It provides a single software platform for migration, disaster recovery, and backup across public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure.
The common thread between migration, DR, and backup is workload replication, and Matters pioneered a now-patented approach to replication that replicates workloads at the filesystem level rather than using a VMDK conversion approach or sector-level storage replication. There are two versions of the platform: one for physical and virtual servers and the other for Kubernetes clusters.
The company reckons that, at a high level, much of the DR market, including platforms such as Zerto, Veeam, Commvault, and native solutions like VMware Site Recovery, have traditionally relied on replication tied closely to the virtualization or hypervisor layer. RackWare’s replication operates at the OS and file-system layer, which means it isn't dependent on the source hypervisor or its underlying SDKs to move or protect a workload, freeing the software from any constraints imposed by source or target environments.
Workloads can be replicated between any two hypervisors, public or private clouds, or bare metal, and, with the Kubernetes version, between any two K8s distributions. Attempts by platform vendors to constrain workload mobility out of their platforms (most recently Broadcom’s removal of the VMware VDDK) are irrelevant at the filesystem level.
There are other technical advantages to filesystem-level replication, but cross-platform mobility is what’s driving the most business for RackWare lately.
SimplyBlock and RackWare
We recently looked at SimplyBlock and its business continuity and disaster recovery functions for Red Hat OpenShift deployments to help with VMware-to-OpenShift migrations. How does it compare to Rackware?
They both target OpenShift continuity, but they protect different layers. SimplyBlock is about storage-level replication for clusters that already run on SimplyBlock. RackWare SWIFT is workload-level replication that can move or recover OpenShift applications onto almost any other Kubernetes platform, including a different storage system.
RackWare SWIFT, part of the RackWare Management Module, sits outside the clusters and replicates Kubernetes and OpenShift applications: namespaces, pods, configs, secrets, and persistent volumes, stateful and stateless. It is agentless, uses a delta-sync engine, and encrypts transfers. Supported targets include OpenShift, EKS, AKS, GKE, OKE, Rancher, and others, including cross-cloud and cross-version replication.
It’s suggested that you use SimplyBlock DR when the production and recovery OpenShift clusters will both run on SimplyBlock and the requirement is low-RPO volume protection without a per-node DR license. Use RackWare when the job is to replicate or fail over the applications themselves across clouds, Kubernetes distributions, or from VMware, and the target storage can be whatever that platform already provides.
Datadobi also offers migration facilities but it and RackWare are not substitutes. A VMware-to-cloud project and a NetApp-to-Isilon NAS refresh are different jobs. RackWare moves whole workloads; Datadobi moves unstructured files and objects.
Bootnote
RackWare was founded in 2009 in Santa Clara, California (later associated with the San Jose / Fremont area) by Sash Sunkara and Todd Matters. It started with angel funding and a narrower goal around storage-array management with LSI’s Engenio unit; after that partnership ended around 2011, it shifted to hybrid-cloud migration, disaster recovery, and workload mobility. Sunkara was the CEO until 2019 when he resigned. Todd Matters remains co-founder and CTO. Bryan Gobbett is the current CEO, appointed in 2019.
It’s had angel, seed, Series A and Series B funding rounds, accompanied by various loans, and has raised between $16 million and $23 million in total, with the last known funding event in 2021. Investors include Signal Peak Ventures, Oquirrh Ventures, Osage Venture Partners, Royal Street Ventures, Frazier VC, Park City Angels, Run Ventures and Kickstart Seed Fund.

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