Achieving the Best of Both Worlds: 1TB/hr Restores + the Benefits & Cost Efficiency of Native Cloud

Do you think it’s impossible to achieve a 1 TB per hour (1TB/hr) restores in the cloud? Think again.

We are proud to announce that Druva has exceeded the 1TB/hr performance threshold, providing businesses with a clear path to adopt the cloud for server backup and recovery — without having to complicate their on-premises environment. As a result, our customers are able to lower their TCO significantly.

The Needs of the Market

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has consistently proven to the market and to the world that cloud adoption is growing aggressively without any signs of slowing down. As new distributed models emerge and the data that needs to be managed grows larger by the minute, IT infrastructure is rapidly evolving to meet demands. Technology teams still need to deliver on critical service-level agreements (SLAs) despite the changing landscape, which has proven to be a serious challenge for many companies.

Embracing the cloud for data protection and management seems promising, but for many companies, there is still a perceived issue with the upstream and downstream movement of the data and how it might impact their recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) needs.

When we created Phoenix CloudCache, our goal was to enable organizations to break through traditional barriers so they could gain all the benefits of the cloud, without compromising SLAs for their mission-critical applications. We can now say, that day has come!

But don’t take my word for it. We’ve found that listening to our customers is the best way to highlight our capabilities.

Listening to Our Customers

One of Druva’s key clients that manufactures treatment systems, has multiple data centers and remote sites with varying bandwidth availability (5 Mbps at remote sites to 100 Mbps at the data centers) and over 40 TB of data to back up. Their environment is more than 90% virtualized, and several of their virtual machines (VMs) run business-critical workloads. It was critical that their backup solution have the ability to restore a 1TB VM in under an hour. While cloud-based backup greatly simplified their backup and restore workflow with central visibility and management, limited bandwidth availability resulted in slower restores, which posed a challenge for their adoption of the cloud. The need to accelerate the movement of data was very real.

This company is only one of our many customers who are in process of adopting cloud and need to deliver on the promises they’ve made to their various lines of business.

Druva’s Cloud Approach

Druva builds tools based on the core principle that the cloud is the future of enterprise infrastructure and applications. We also recognize that companies have very real problems to solve that stem from the current limitations of their infrastructure. This transformation will not happen overnight for most companies. For that reason, Druva has endeavored to bridge this gap for our customers and provide them with the capability to break free of their existing restraints and make the transition to the cloud while still running their business.

Under the Hood

CloudCache locally stores backup data to enable faster restores and is designed to operate as an optional component within the overall Druva Phoenix solution. This option was designed specifically for customers who are currently constrained by bandwidth and have aggressive backup and restore SLAs. As their bandwidth improves at their backup sites, customers who are using Phoenix CloudCache can seamlessly remove it without disrupting any of their backup and restore processes.

Druva’s CloudCache solution provides you with the following:

• Flexibility — CloudCache is configured to asynchronously transfer the backed-up data to the Druva cloud. This transfer can be flexibly scheduled during off-peak hours with effective bandwidth throttling option.
• Efficiency — Source-side global deduplication technology is at the heart of Phoenix. We designed CloudCache to be intelligent in managing metadata directly with the cloud, ensuring that all devices across all sites optimally transfer data. We do not compromise on any of the bandwidth, storage, or cost-savings benefits that we offer to our customers.

The Druva Difference

While most traditional backup vendors provide the ability to perform backups locally while moving the data to the cloud at a later time, the cloud is only an afterthought for many of them. They treat the cloud as a simply a place to dump data (like a tape drive), which results in redundant data sets and few (if any) controls and management capabilities that reside solely in the on-prem backup servers. This model does not allow for the cost-effective scalability, seamless central management, or global deduplication that should be part of a true SaaS solution.

With the Druva’s Phoenix CloudCache solution, you get the following benefits:

• Faster RTOs: Even with large datasets, CloudCache can seamlessly perform LAN speed restores of over 1 TB per hour. Snapshots that are up to 30 days old can be restored from the local cache at LAN speeds, while anything retained past 30 days is always available from the cloud — all from the same administrative console view.
• Higher Number of RPOs: Druva Phoenix places no limitations on the size or number of backup snapshots that can be created. Since data is replicated to the cloud from the CloudCache on a scheduled basis, high performance backups can happen on a continuous basis and data can be transferred to the cloud during off-peak hours.
• LAN Speed Initial Backup: For Druva clients who need to back up very large amounts of data as part of a rollout, Phoenix CloudCache can be temporarily provisioned for this use. Although CloudCache is designed to run continuously, it can be instantiated selectively in multiple locations for big-data transfer events, and added or removed at any time without impacting cloud-stored data or recovery.
• Scalability: Cloud-native architecture ensures that your backups seamlessly scale as your data footprint grows. You no longer have to worry about limitations of backup servers or media servers and the accompanying management overhead that’s common with traditional solutions. What’s more, the CloudCache software is free to use on any commodity hardware, which can easily be repurposed once the CloudCache is no longer needed.
• Lower TCO: — Unlike expensive purpose-built hardware appliances, CloudCache is a highly flexible software appliance that can be provisioned using commodity servers and storage in any number of remote sites. You can dedicate as much or as little as you need.

By offering a pure consumption-based pay-as-you-go model for data protection in the cloud, Druva frees companies from the complexity and cost of managing and scaling their own hardware.

Learn more about how your organization can benefit from Druva Phoenix.