Why Druva is a perfect fit for VMware Cloud on AWS

VMworld 2021 was all about multi-cloud and VMware’s increased focus on cloud economics, scalability, and security. Organizations of all sizes are wrestling with how to use the cloud to evolve their business and application models without putting data at risk. From the business model perspective, you may not think of yourself as multi-cloud, but if you pause to evaluate the apps you use today and where that data is stored, you’ll quickly realize that your data has left the building and is now spread across hybrid clouds, public clouds, and edge devices. Applications are no longer monolithic and based solely in one or two data centers, but built from composite elements such as containers and microservices. As customers evolve their use of cloud services, they typically expand their use of these types of services to other clouds. VMware can help customers make this transition by delivering a software-defined data center (SDDC) that can run both on-premises and on any public or private cloud. We saw this with announcements that included support for VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. 

VMware Cloud on AWS enables you to capitalize on key benefits of the cloud on-demand services and consumption-based pricing, while still retaining the infrastructure and IT processes that you know. Druva has collaborated with VMware so you can experience the same cloud economics and benefits across your backup infrastructure as well.

The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud lets you not only back up virtual machines (VMs) in your on-premises data centers, but also those on VMware Cloud on AWS. All these VMs are backed up to a single and secure data pool which maximizes storage savings (deduplication across multiple SDDCs) and provides centralized visibility for your entire VMware infrastructure. 

When you start your cloud journey, you need a cloud-native solution that covers all your VMware workloads. The solution should scale as you move to the hybrid cloud and ultimately run all new workloads in VMware Cloud on AWS. Druva has been a VMware Cloud on AWS partner for more than a year and seamlessly helps you achieve all these goals. Finally, as customers adopt VMC as an extended data center, they only need to deploy a single component from Druva (i.e. proxy) to start discovering and protecting this data.

Druva is now a VMware Ready for VMware Cloud on AWS partner, which means that when you deploy VMware Cloud on AWS, you can turn to a validated solution to help with your data protection needs. Check out the VMware Compatibility Guide. 

Protect and recover VMC with greater flexibility, speed and security 

Druva can back up virtual machines created in VMware Cloud (VMC) software-defined data centers (SDDC) in the same manner as as vSphere deployed on-premises and provides these benefits:

• Flexible recovery and workload mobility:
  • Recover back to same VMC SDDC 
  • Recover to a different SDDC in VMC 
  • Recover to an on-premise data center  
  • Recover on-premises VMs into a VMC SDDC 

Key features driving speed include:

• Use of native VMware API to back up and restore data
• Efficient block-level incremental backups using VMware CBT
• File-level recovery from virtual machines
• Leverages hot add transport mode for backups 
• Automated VM backups based on tags, datastores, and clusters
• One-click, orchestrated failover/failback for disaster recovery in your AWS environment  

Enhance security with Druva AWS PrivateLink integration

We are constantly striving to enhance the security of our solution without creating more complexity. We first leveraged AWS PrivateLink for our disaster recovery solution. You can read my blog for details. Now, we are extending this capability to VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS to secure communication between your VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS instance and the Druva Cloud. The use of AWS PrivateLink ensures that your data isn’t exposed to public internet. 

As illustrated in the diagram:

• To back up and restore virtual machines hosted on your VMware Cloud setup, you have to deploy a Druva backup proxy for VMware. 
• Data is globally deduplicated at the backup proxy providing bandwidth-efficient transmission to the Druva Cloud. 
• An AWS PrivateLink connection increases the data transfer efficiency as data moves over the AWS backbone network as opposed to public internet.
• Additionally, an AWS PrivateLink connection helps to minimize the data egress charges you pay while backing up the virtual machine in a VMC.

Next steps

Now you know how easy it is to use Druva for protecting your VMware data, whether it resides in the cloud, on-premises, or in an edge location. 

Visit our VMware page to learn more about what we do, read the VMware on AWS white paper, or watch the video below, demonstrating Druva’s backup and recovery solution for VMware in action.