Mergers and acquisitions provide many opportunities as well as challenges to organizations in any industry. When Suez Water Technologies and Solutions acquired GE Water, Suez’s IT needed to move data on 60 servers — VMware virtual machines (VMs) and physical file servers — off of GE’s network and onto its own network. The company then had to find a way to efficiently back up that data — all on an aggressive schedule.
With the ultimate goal of moving as much infrastructure to the cloud as possible, the team, which was already using several services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), turned to the cloud-native data protection provided by the Druva Cloud Platform. While it was able to migrate backups of the data from its 60 servers efficiently to the Druva platform, it simultaneously noticed that storage costs were escalating for its AWS workloads. The culprits were discovered to be, in part, snapshot sprawl and limited backup visibility.
Timothy Loranger, Cloud Infrastructure Services Leader at Suez said, “Our company was taking a plethora of snapshots, and we didn’t have visibility or retention control, so our costs continued to escalate. Additionally, our backups weren’t centrally managed, so it was a challenge to know how much storage we actually needed.”
Backup visibility helps drive 4x reduction in Amazon EBS storage and snapshot sprawl
After migrating backups of its AWS environment — which encompassed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system on Oracle, SQL server in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) running MySQL, Oracle, and SQL databases — to Druva, Loranger said the team now has the visibility it needs to control snapshots and gain insight into its environment.
“We’re able to right-size our environment simply by reviewing our Druva reports and taking the appropriate action,” he said.
With Druva, “In less than a year, we cut our Amazon EBS costs in half.” This is thanks to the visibility Druva offers relating to all backups — VMs, physical file servers, Oracle and SQL databases, and EC2 instances. “Additionally, using Druva’s solution for Oracle, we achieved a four times reduction in EBS storage consumption,” Loranger said.
Reducing costs across the business — Slashing TCO by 50 percent
Cloud backup and disaster recovery (DR) for on-premises and cloud workloads eliminates hardware/software refresh cycles, which reduces costs and lets people manage data — not infrastructure. In fact, the Suez team achieved a 6x reduction in resources needed to manage backups.
The Druva Cloud Platform gives Suez a single tool to protect, store, and recover business-critical workloads, including 90+ terabytes (TB) of Oracle on EC2, SQL on EC2, thousands of AWS instances, Amazon RDS workloads, and 50+ TB of NAS data.
“We’ve saved money and improved team efficiency across the board,” Loranger said. “Overall, with Druva we cut our TCO by 50 percent — and even more than that when you factor in cost avoidance.”
Additionally, Druva’s direct-to-cloud backup and integrated long-term retention simplify compliance, while data isolation and ransomware recovery enhance security.
Suez achieves backup, recovery, and disaster recovery for hybrid workloads
Just like most organizations, Suez isn’t moving to the cloud all at once, and the Druva Cloud Platform gives them the flexibility needed to protect application workloads on-premises and in the cloud.
Suez’s hybrid workloads such as vSphere, SQL, and Oracle, run both on-premises and in the cloud. Druva’s data protection-as-a-service helps Loranger and team to protect workloads wherever they live, reducing costs and complexity, and providing a future-proof architecture.
What’s next?
Read the Suez Water Technologies and Solutions case study to learn more about how Druva enabled Suez to reduce its database backup complexity with a unified solution, while helping its DBAs and backup teams improve recovery time and recovery point objectives (RPO and RTO).