Kent RO Systems trusts Druva to protect data on 100 virtual machines (VMs)

Unanimously acknowledged as the leader in the Reverse Osmosis (RO) water purifier category, Kent pioneered bringing revolutionary RO technology to India. Equipped with a vision for a healthier world and the technological expertise to come up with innovative solutions, the brand started its operations from Noida, India in 1999, and has grown to become the largest manufacturer of water purifiers in India.

Kent RO Systems is a trusted expert in purified water — serving more than four million customers across India. The company has grown rapidly, underpinned by the support of its IT team.

The team operates a hybrid IT infrastructure, managing 1,500 endpoints, 100 VMware VMs between the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and its internal data center, and some on-premises Windows servers. Two years ago, the company relied on tape to back up data from VMs, while end users stored data on public drives. Storing VM backups on tapes was tedious, time consuming, and cumbersome, said Saurabh Gupta, Chief Information Officer at Kent RO Systems. “Our staff had to put a lot of time in VM tape backups, validating these backups, and rotating tapes at different locations,” Saurabh said.

Plus, the backups alone required two full-time staff to manage and rotate tapes between two locations. Further data recovery also took a lot of time from tape backups. Saurabh’s team became increasingly concerned about how the company would recover if those backups failed. “We calculated the cost of missing a single backup or of a single tape failing,” Saurabh said. “It was extremely serious for us, and that’s when we started looking for a way to back up our data securely in the cloud.”

Saurabh wanted a cloud-based approach that would provide a simple, centralized management console for managing endpoint and VM backups. The software needed to make data restoration simple in the case of failure or loss. The backup process needed to be low-maintenance, consistent, and easily accessible.

Saurabh decided to conduct two proofs of concept (POCs) between Druva and another cloud-native solution on a Windows server running a Microsoft SQL database. While both solutions were cloud-native, only Druva offered an intuitive user interface and proactive alerts.

“The most important factor was proactive alerts,” Saurabh said. “It was even more important to us than the ability to restore the data, because our team was spending so much time checking if backups were successful. If we wanted to reduce our time managing backups, we needed to trust the system to alert us right away if there was an issue. And that’s exactly what Druva did.”

Saurabh was also impressed with the deduplication rate he could achieve with Druva. “We had a huge amount of duplicate data with our previous solution because it was impossible to manage the data across different platforms,” Saurabh said. “That’s another way Druva ticked our boxes.”

In the end, Kent RO Systems chose the Druva Cloud Platform. Today, its 100 VMs are now protected against data loss or corruption with backups that are isolated from their network (in the Druva cloud). Despite bandwidth restrictions at the customer site that extended the time to complete the first full backups, the team received excellent customer support throughout the process. Once the first full backups were completed, all subsequent backups were deduplicated, and forever incrementals made daily backups easily achievable.

“Everything went smoothly — even with our limited system bandwidth,” Saurabh said. “Druva made it easy to set up a proxy here, and we moved data over seamlessly.”

Now 18 months later, Saurabh said the greatest benefit of Druva is peace of mind.

“I feel confident that if disaster happens, we are in a much better position to recover our data,” Saurabh said. “But it’s about more than that — I can get the same VM back. If something went wrong with one of the servers, configuration was tedious. With Druva, we get the VM back exactly as it was, making life so much easier.”

That restoration capability paid off when Kent RO Systems experienced two critical server failures shortly after moving to Druva. Though such events are obviously stressful, Saurabh was confident he could restore the data quickly.

Saurabh is thrilled the team reduced its time spent managing backups — realizing an impressive 8x reduction in operational overhead. It used to require two full-time staff to manage backups. Now, it only takes one person two hours a day. And since Druva is so simple to use, Saurabh doesn’t need to worry about filling specialized backup roles. “It used to be difficult to find qualified backup specialists,” Saurabh said. “But now, anyone on the team can use Druva, and I can spend my time recruiting to fill other crucial roles.”

Saurabh feels his team is perfectly positioned to further innovate and contribute to the company’s growth.