Patent ID: 8538919

Claim:
A virtual computing system comprising: a virtual computing system platform comprising a processor, a storage device, and hypervisor, wherein the virtual computing system platform is configured to implement one or more guest computing systems at a first location, wherein each guest computing system is configured to perform information processing with one or more applications and incrementally forward updates to a persistently stored image of the guest computing system at a second location; a management gateway coupled to the one or more guest systems, wherein the management gateway is configured to run one or more of the guest computing systems at a second location if the one or more guest systems become unavailable at the first location, wherein the management gateway is configured to ensure that a single copy of each running guest computing system is present at the first location or the second location but not both; and one or more logical volume storage devices coupled to the processor and a memory, the storage devices retaining data on behalf of one or more virtual machines wherein: data stored in the one or more logical volume storage devices on behalf of a running virtual machine is encrypted by the storage device at block level using an encryption key; data retrieved from the one or more logical volume storage devices is decrypted from encrypted block level data on behalf of a running virtual machine using an encryption key; the contents of the storage devices are incrementally backed up without decryption so that the data can be replicated elsewhere; wherein the encryption key is persistently stored at a location associated with an owner of the data in the virtual machines; wherein the contents of the one or more logical volume storage devices are replicated at a location not associated with the data in the virtual machines wherein the encryption key is automatically or manually provided to the one or more logical volume storage devices according to policy when the encryption key is used to access the stored data in unencrypted form so that the encryption key does not need to be persistently stored at the location of the one or more logical volume storage devices.