Egan replaces Veeam with Druva to save more than 50 percent time and effort

Egan Company is a single-source specialty contractor based in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. Starting as Joseph Egan’s pipefitting shop in 1903, it has grown into an experienced team with over 1,100 employees and more than 10 specialty trades, from millwrighting to process control integration. The company prides itself on consistently delivering an integrated, efficient customer experience from start to finish.

Egan’s 12-person IT group supports several permanent offices and many job sites that can range from a few workers installing rooftop infrastructure to a hundred workers on a major construction project. Egan is 100% virtualized with hundreds of Chromebooks, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) clients and nearly 100 VMs. They leverage a variety of SaaS apps hosted on AWS, Google, and Azure, and their own infrastructure runs in a private cloud.

Modern commercial construction firms manage huge amounts of data, and Egan is no exception, with operations depending on terabytes of CAD-based and other files. There was a time when construction tasks occurred sequentially – first the framing, then the plumbing, then the electrical, and so on. Now, Egan’s projects move much faster because everything is happening at once or whenever a specific resource is available. This approach depends on extremely precise plans and scheduling, which means that Egan’s success depends on datasets that are completely protected, backed up, and immediately restorable. According to Jim Nonn, Egan’s CIO, “If the right data isn’t there, if we can’t avoid collisions, all work just grinds to a halt.”

For server backups, Egan had long ago moved from tapes to disks, first with a Commvault solution. Unhappy with upgrades and changes that required onsite consultants, they moved to Veeam. However, that solution still depended on local storage (an intermediary) for remote replication, a fundamental weakness in the eyes of Egan’s IT group.

Jim was attending a VMware user group (VMUG) meeting, discussing a disaster recovery (DR) solution, when he was first introduced to Druva. “They said they were backing up to the cloud without an intermediary. This was huge for me, it solved a lot of issues for DR and backup, so the team and I decided to go with a trial of Druva Phoenix. It was an excellent decision,” Jim said.

After a quick setup, Egan saw Druva Phoenix demonstrate its speed, reliability, and ease-of-use far beyond expectations. Jim reported, “If 100 companies did a Druva Phoenix trial, 99 would buy it.”

With Druva Phoenix, Egan gets data protection and management for its enterprise workloads with a unique cloud-first approach — saving over 30 hours a month for maintenance and storage management. It combines high-performance, scalable backup, disaster recovery, archival, and analytics to simplify data protection, improving visibility and dramatically reducing the risk, cost, and effort of managing the construction company’s complex information environment — all delivered as-a-service.

Andy Blomquist, Egan’s IT systems and support manager, is looking forward to setting up VM spin-ups from the cloud for DR, not to mention running their VMs in the cloud day-to-day. About Egan’s experience with Druva Phoenix, Andy says: “It’s pretty slick, pushing everything up to the cloud, and it worked exactly as promised. It was crickets, and you don’t often experience that in IT.”

Visit the Druva Phoenix product page for more insights into cloud-based data protection.

Check out our Q&A blog series with Egan’s Jim Nonn and Andy Blomquist.

Read how Build Group, a leading San Francisco Bay Area commercial construction firm, constructed a comprehensive server and endpoint backup solution.

If 100 companies did a Druva Phoenix trial, 99 would buy it.”

— Jim Nonn, CIO, Egan Company