Category Archives: About Druva

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ll know that Apple recently launched Mac OS X Lion. Hot on the heels of this release, Druva just released support for Lion with inSync 4.2.1.

One of the best things about startups is your ability to be nimble. Our Engineering team continues to march on and turn things around at a rapid rate, with on average a new release every 2 months, which includes new features, platform support and fixes. We regularly solicit feedback from our customers, either directly, through our Druva community or through support while moving forward with our roadmap.

You can download the latest inSync releases from here. Definitely excited for the next release of inSync, 4.2.2 which is due in a few days, while 4.3 is planned for October with more enhancements which we’re keeping under wraps right now, but stay tuned

Everyone tries to lay claim to being the “fastest”, “biggest”, “strongest”, “most secure”, “the best”, “industry leading”. Very often these are marketing gimmicks, just something in the messaging to entice potential prospects. Marketing has changed a lot over the years, it’s become more of a combo of art and science. But some of the fluff is still there. Without data to support it, anyone can say they’re the fastest, and no-one can dispute them until they do some testing.

At a previous company I worked at in the data protection space, the tagline was “Fastest Restore. Period”. My immediate question to that was, “How do we know? Have we benchmarked this?”. At Druva, when I joined I saw that our messaging said that we saved “Over 90% in storage and bandwidth”. Pretty stellar figures I thought, but can we support them? In our own testing, these were the figures we’d seen, but I wanted more concrete evidence, so we brought in ESG to run Druva inSync through it’s paces in their lab.

We worked with Tony Palmer, a Senior Analyst and Lab Engineer at ESG Labs. We gave him the background to the software, what it did, how it worked, and we pointed him to the download of the enterprise version. “Great, we’ll talk to you in a few weeks then” he said. And off he went.

Tony came back a few weeks later with the lab report. The results were in. He was actually able to recreate the “90% savings” in his working lab environment. In fact, the ESG lab team were able to achieve the following results:

• 96% savings in storage
• Deduplication resulted in total of 38.6GB disk storage for 1TB total backup size
• Deduplication ratio was 26:1
• Install & deploy in less than 20 minutes
• First backup of 5.2GB took only 12 minutes
• Server CPU peaked at only 11%
• RAM utilization maxed out at 140MB

Every environment is different, but in this “work-like” live environment, inSync passed the test. You always want to be able to back up your numbers, and now we can with this ESG Lab report. We always say at Druva “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”. So we encourage people to download inSync, try it, play with it in your environment, try to break it, and see how it works. You really won’t know until you try it.

* You can download the full ESG Report in PDF format here *

I can still remember working from a “shared” garage office when Druva was a bootstrapped company with just 7 people.

After wasting about 6 months, the “eureka” moment came in July 2008 with the launch of inSync, and since then we haven’t had the time to look back.

Today I’m delighted to announce the closing of a new “scale-up” Series B round of funding for $12M lead by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from Sequoia Capital. The official announcement and more details can be found here.

This round will help us to continue our momentum and make some strategic investments. In the recent past Druva has demonstrated technological leadership with the introduction of unique innovative products such as SafePoint, support for iOS/Android and lead the way by being the first data protection company to offer strict enterprise SLAs for data backup to the cloud. Over the next year to 18 months, our key focus will be to significantly grow sales and marketing while still continuing the spirit and culture of innovation and reinvention that has brought us success so far.

In thinking about the trip so far, being an amateur hiker, it reminds me of hiking a steep ascent. As you go higher, the view just gets better, and I’m confident that we are soon going to be at the top.