In this blog series, I’m addressing how the cloud can change your NAS backup and recovery paradigm. In Part 1 of this series, I sought to put a stake in the ground and differentiate the value of a cloud-native approach to backup and recovery of NAS data versus local backup to disk, tape, or even a cloud tier from within your data center infrastructure. In this post, I’ll discuss additional ways that a cloud-centric approach can reduce costs and complexity.
Driving cost and complexity out of every corner of NAS backup
Eliminating backup infrastructure costs, maintenance, and hidden shadow-storage costs are key ways that Druva drives down customer costs. But what about all of the NAS data that is infrequently accessed, forgotten, or intentionally held long-term for compliance or business purposes? Druva intelligent tiering for long-term retention (LTR) was announced in the Fall of 2019 (read data retention solution brief) and is a powerful and unique capability that helps customers treat data differently and reap immediate savings by:
- Offering immediate cost reductions to Druva customers and 30% lower costs for LTR data
- Eliminating reliance on tape or disk infrastructure for long-term retention
- Keeping the last 15 days of backups in warm storage
Where and how you tier your data matters. After all, the idea of data tiering for both primary and backup data has been around for many years. It shouldn’t be a surprise that how you tier backup data in the cloud also matters. While some solutions offer the ability to move data into AWS S3 Glacier, Druva moves data to AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive and passes those savings to our customers (Glacier Deep Archive (GDA) is 70% less than Glacier as of the time writing this blog — see AWS storage-pricing calculator). But it’s not just the tier that makes a difference — it’s the whole process.
If you were to use your existing vendor’s cloud API or even a cloud-gateway, you’re adding another layer of storage management, costs, and uncertainty. For example, moving data across storage tiers for either backup or recovery can result in put/get fees (i.e., egress charge). These can be difficult to predict and the institutional knowledge around their existence and operations is often tied to the team that configured it. Druva makes managing backup storage simple for you and eliminates hidden costs in the cloud. We license based on one metric: back-end storage consumed after dedupe — with no fees for ingress or egress.
Easier and simpler data protection management
By eliminating many of the daily, weekly, and monthly tasks associated with the administration and management of your backup infrastructure, Druva can free up your time to focus on service-level agreements (RPOs/RTOs) and other higher value-add projects. With additional time available, you might be able to analyze your backup environment and specifically what you backup from NAS, what you could exclude, and what you can delete assuming your business owners agree.
Storage analytics and insights made easy with Druva
Druva helps you realize and extract additional value from your backup data. Many backup vendors provide reporting capabilities, but in order to analyze the data you first have to know what to ask, run reports or build dashboards, and then decide how to act. With a tip of the hat to the many backup wizards and scripting hounds, Druva is making this easier with a new capability called ‘Storage Insights.’ You can learn more about it (and how it impacts NAS) in an upcoming blog.
With Druva, even though you license based on the amount of data you store with us, we make it easier for you to store what matters most even if that means storing less. If you have useless data that shouldn’t be retained, then there is no need to store it and replicate it somewhere else (no replication with Druva).
These types of storage insights and the ability to act on them quickly is just one example of how customers can extract more value from their backup data.
Next steps
The goal of this blog series was not to answer all of the questions about better NAS backup and recovery, but to illustrate how Druva’s cloud-centric approach can transform something that didn’t seem possible or realistic five years ago.
Experience our cloud-centric approach in real time and join us for Tuesday Live!, our weekly product demo.