Doyenz has started calling its patent-pending managed service platform, now on rev 3, ShadowCloud, a name that makes a lot of sense when you think about it since its first mover skills are active disaster recovery, failover and migrations in the cloud.

It replicates a virtual copy of the user’s production infrastructure in the cloud and is supposed to let service providers leverage virtualization and automation to deliver enterprise-grade IT capabilities to their SMB clients at predictable SaaS prices they can afford since redundant data centers are out of the question and traditional DR takes days to restore.

Doyenz provides an agent-based production-ready image that can be run on-demand in the cloud in case of – eek! – a failure.

Service providers can also use the latest copy of the production image at any time to test, patch and upgrade servers in the Doyenz Production-Ready Virtual Lab and then provision, deploy or just plain run them in the cloud.

With its 3.0 version, the Doyenz platform now supports both physical and virtual IT environments, including VMWare vSphere. Hyper-V is on the way. The company claims ROI can be measured in hours or days instead of weeks or months and complexity is low to non-existent.

Doyenz calculates that it can accelerate deployments by 50% and reduce labor costs by 40% while promising safe migrations with zero customer downtime.

The two-year-old start-up is strictly channels-based and currently limited to Windows environments. It’s partnered with both Microsoft and Intel.

It’s picked up $5 million so far in Series A funding from angel investors with another $2 million reportedly coming in.

The money should last until the end of next year when the company expects to be close to profitability, according to CEO and serial entrepreneur Ashutosh Tiwary, an ex-Microsoftie who was senior architect for Visual Studio Team System and managed a product unit that built a suite of tools for software testing.

Doyenz competes with seasoned folks like CA. Prices run $100/server/month.