BW Offshore Achieves 80% Time Savings for Nutanix & Hyper-V Backups with Druva

BW Offshore Limited is a global owner and operator of floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessels. The company is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The company has its headquarters in Singapore and Oslo, Norway, but operates internationally. The largest shareholder is BW Group Limited, holding 49.3% of the shares.

BW Offshore’s IT team faced significant challenges with its legacy backup system. The traditional software and appliance-based solution could handle basic backups and restores but was resource-intensive, heavily reliant on manual intervention, and failed to meet recovery SLAs. For a global company, this setup was not only cumbersome but also introduced considerable security vulnerabilities.

Peter Tham, Hardware & Technical Lead at BW explained: “Managing local hardware has been a significant challenge, particularly on vessels where access is limited,” he said. “Frankly, maintaining hardware has been a constant headache for us.”

Limited bandwidth and high latency from satellite connectivity made off-site data replication on the vessels a significant challenge, often disrupting production systems. The IT team spent an entire day each week managing backups, yet still couldn’t ensure complete protection. They needed a modern, scalable solution that delivered reliability and peace of mind—without the complexity of on-prem appliances.

After a thorough evaluation of solutions, including Veeam, Rubrik, and other existing vendors, BW Offshore selected Druva. Druva became their first AWS-based solution in an otherwise Azure-heavy IT environment, with simplicity, scalability, and security being the three key factors driving their decision.

With Druva, the company eliminated the need for physical backup appliances, moving fully to a SaaS model. Deployment was refreshingly quick: the first workload was operational within an hour, with replication completed in just a week. This impressive speed was achieved despite extreme, satellite-based bandwidth limitations, a common challenge for their deep-sea vessels. Druva's powerful deduplication engine and advanced optimization proved crucial in making this possible.

Druva also offered seamless support for BW Offshore’s diverse workloads, including Nutanix AHV and Hyper-V environments. Its centralized dashboard made it easy for Tham and his team to monitor backups across geographies without additional overhead.

When asked about the process to get Druva up and running, Tham replied, “Druva was simple to get up and running, and even with our bandwidth challenges, it just worked. It’s secure, reliable, and I barely need to think about it anymore.”

With Druva, BW Offshore transformed its data protection strategy, replacing a complex and time-intensive process with one that is seamless, dependable, and secure. This transition delivered remarkable outcomes, freeing up valuable time for Tham and his team, while instilling renewed confidence in their operations.

• 80% reduction in time spent on backup management: Tham now spends less than an hour per week on backup management, a drastic decrease from the one full day he used to spend on it. This reclaimed time allows the IT team to focus on more strategic initiatives.
• Peace of mind from a centralized, cloud-native platform: With Druva, Tham now relies on a centralized dashboard that gives him a "very good visibility" into his backups. This eliminated the uncertainty he felt with the previous solution.
• Improved off-site backup reliability: Unlike their previous solution, which struggled with high latency satellite connectivity, Druva seamlessly replicates data to the cloud. This ensures critical data is protected off-site without affecting production systems.
• Elimination of on-prem hardware: By switching to a SaaS solution, BW Offshore no longer has the burden of managing on-prem appliances, which were a constant source of maintenance headaches and security concerns.
• Seamless operation even with extremely low bandwidth: Even on deep-sea vessels with minimal bandwidth, Druva's powerful deduplication engine and advanced optimization ensure cloud backups work flawlessly.

Tham summed up the shift perfectly: “Before Druva, backups consumed a big part of my week. Now, I just check the dashboard — it’s set it and forget it. Losing Druva would be unthinkable for us.”