Ashutosh Tiwary knows what it is like to build a company during tough economic times. His last startup, Performant, was built amid the carnage of the dot com massacre and was sold at a nice profit to Mercury Interactive for $22.5 million in 2003. Now, as the founder and CEO of Doyenz -- a 2-year-old Bellevue virtualization startup -- he is trying to do it again. The computer scientist is already meeting with more success than he imagined.

Doyenz just raised a $5 million first round of capital, with another $1.5 million expected to arrive in the next 90 to 120 days. That's a big chunk of capital, especially for an angel round in this climate. 

"We are making progress that is even surprising ourselves. Seriously," said Tiwary. "We thought it would be much more of a struggle, and the traction that we are seeing in the market is incredible."

Tiwary said they plan to announce new partnerships in the coming weeks, and roll out more product features. The company is developing a cloud-based system to that automatically backs up and recovers data for small and medium-sized businesses.

In way, the service reminded me of Symform, which just scored $1.5 million from OVP Venture Partners for its own novel cloud-based disaster recovery service. Tiwary --who is good friends with members of the Symform team -- said the two solutions are actually quite different.

"The fundamental difference ... is that they have customers' data sitting in a repository off site. We provide what we call active disaster recovery," he said. "We are not just migrating pieces of data into the cloud. We are actually migrating pieces of a virtual machine into the cloud, and what that means is that the virtual machine is actually active and I can execute that in the cloud. It is not just bits of data gathering dust."

Of course, many small and medium-sized businesses may not be ready for the jump to cloud computing. And Tiwary understands that hurdle, adding that they aren't trying convince companies to move their entire infrastructure to the cloud.

But he did say they can offer more cost effective disaster recovery services. 

"If a customer solution is running on premise and something goes wrong, we have replicated a copy of their infrastructure in the cloud and within 30 minutes we will turn that server over and it will be running in the cloud," said Tiwary.

Dozens of customers are currently using the product, which is priced on a monthly subscription plan, he said. Doyenz currently employs about 16 people. Its board includes Jeremy Jaech, the former Visio chief executive and Aldus co-founder.