Atlantic Container Line replaces Veritas with Druva to protect Oracle and VM data

Atlantic Container Line (ACL) is the world’s most experienced carrier of containers and roll-on/ roll-off (RORO) cargo, and is owned by the Italian Grimaldi Group. Since 1967, ACL has been a specialized transatlantic carrier of containers, project and oversized cargo, heavy equipment, and vehicles with the world’s largest combination RORO container ships. The company’s headquarters are in Westfield, New Jersey, with offices throughout Europe and North America.

ACL’s busy IT team manages two data centers in the UK and the US – the latter containing a cluster of more than 100 VMware VMs, 50+ file servers, and four Oracle Database Appliances (ODAs). To protect server data, it relied on Veritas NetBackup, storing all backups on-site.

When the ACL team wanted to add five new SAP and Linux servers to its virtual environment, Veritas required that they buy new hardware, as they wouldn’t support upgrading the existing servers. As a result, ACL IT had to deploy on-site proprietary hardware in multiple locations at a cost of nearly US$90K, which did not include the incremental costs of Veritas’ licensing and maintenance.

ACL IT then spent eight months working with Veritas support trying to get the SAP data on the VMs backed up. But, when Veritas couldn’t get this done, ACL IT was forced to hire an outside consultant.

When David Sinnott, IT infrastructure manager at ACL, became concerned that backing up data to the same servers as the workloads was affecting the company’s cyber resilience and its ability to maintain strict compliance, he decided to look for an alternative backup solution. “We knew we needed a better way to seamlessly protect our data,” David said.

ACL also needed to protect its Microsoft 365 data (it relies heavily on Exchange email), with a better solution than the external hard drives it gave to each employee with their laptop, or the costly server backups for folks with desktop computers.

One of ACL’s IT partners recommended Druva, so David conducted a proof of concept (POC) for the company’s European workloads. It worked so well that ACL chose to deploy the Druva Cloud Platform to back up both data centers and Microsoft 365 data for its 400 users.

“We thought about keeping our Oracle backups on Veritas since we had already made such a big investment in their expensive hardware,” David said. “But the advantages of switching to Druva’s cloud-native data protection were too good to ignore. Druva and Veritas are night and day. Everything about Druva was so straightforward. We barely even needed support.”

Lou Cagnassola, ACL network administrator, added, “When we were migrating backups to Druva, we started with the SAP VMs first and thought it was going to be a challenge. But Druva helped us get all five servers backed up within four hours.” This was a whopping 160x faster than with Veritas. He added, “What we spent eight months trying to do with Veritas, we were able to do in four hours with Druva.”

Both David and Lou were impressed with Druva support, as David said, “I couldn’t believe how attentive and amazing the Druva support team was at every stage of implementation and beyond.”

ACL now has the cyber resilience and compliance assurance it needs for its mission-critical Oracle database appliances, VMs, and Microsoft 365 data.

In fact, David’s team has reduced its on-premises footprint while cutting total cost of ownership (TCO) by 50 percent. “Before Druva, I was so concerned that if we had any kind of site failure, those backups would be useless,” David said. “Now our architecture is cyber resilient, and I finally have peace of mind.”

Complexity is greatly reduced as well, with the team cutting time spent managing backups by 93 percent. “I love how easy the Druva Cloud Platform is,” Lou said. “No agent required. I just deploy a proxy, refresh, and there’s my server. I only need a thin client, and I have a single pane of glass to manage backups from anywhere.”

As the pandemic forced so many employees to work remotely, David said that ACL’s email network has become mission-critical. “It was very important to get our Microsoft 365 data backed up to the cloud. Before Druva, our laptop users were responsible for backing up their own data with portable hard drives, which wasn’t reliable. Now we have confidence that all the data is backed up and restorable 24×7.”