Langdale Industries replaces Veeam with Druva to achieve a robust disaster recovery strategy

Langdale Industries, Inc. is a holding company and parent company of 26 subsidiary companies. It is a highly diversified enterprise, as its subsidiaries include forestry, forest products and other affiliate companies that span the automotive, banking, hospitality and land development industries. Centralized administrative and support functions of the organization include executive management, industrial relations, legal, environmental, computer services, treasury, internal audit and accounting.

Langdale IT is responsible for managing, maintaining, and securing the IT environments of all of the company’s subsidiaries, so it oversees multiple data centers and networks. About five of the subsidiaries are managed on the corporate office network, but the remaining companies each run a separate environment managed by Langdale IT.

IT was keen to standardize key elements of each IT environment, such as data protection and disaster recovery (DR), while allowing each subsidiary to have the flexibility to do what it needed.

To protect it’s VMware VMs and physical servers across its locations, it relied on Veeam which stored backup data on NAS or other types of storage on-premises. “We believe in the 3-2-1 rule, but with Veeam we were not utilizing their cloud-based backup, so we were limited to on-premise backups. This meant we didn’t have a robust DR strategy,” said Robert Elworthy, assistant director of IT.

Additionally, Langdale IT was not backing up its endpoints. “Before implementing Druva to protect the endpoints of our C-suite and upper management we used external drives on-premises. When these employees traveled, we did not have a backup strategy to leverage when needed nor were we prepared to recover from a catastrophic event.” 

“This exposed us to accidental deletion, ransomware, corruption and device loss or theft. We knew we needed to change our backup strategy,” added Robert.

To mitigate concerns regarding endpoint backup and implement a cloud-based and standardized approach Langdale IT looked at offerings from Rubrik and others, but quickly found that Druva’s solution was exactly what it needed.

One of the key differentiators is Druva’s secure and efficient cloud-based storage delivered as a service. Backup data is secured through immutable storage and isolated off-premises, which protects it from deletion (accidental or intentional), corruption, and ransomware attacks. Storage efficiency in the Druva Cloud Platform comes from global, source-based deduplication and other automated storage tiering. And with all data stored online, Druva offers flexible recovery options for files, VMs, and data in the cloud or back to on-premises systems.

“We implemented Druva inSync and not only did we enable a robust DR plan and backup strategy for all endpoints, but it also gave us ransomware protection all in one,” said Robert. With Druva inSync’s ease of implementation and use, the team evaluated Druva Phoenix for server based workloads and quickly decided to replace Veeam VM and physical server data protection.

“The Druva Cloud Platform is a one-stop-shop allowing us to manage all 26 holding companies’ data via a central management console,” said Robert. “I do a lot of due diligence before I pick a product, which also includes the service and the company behind it. We set the bar high with our new data protection strategy, and the Druva Cloud Platform has exceeded our expectations,” Robert said.

The Druva Cloud Platform provides Langdale IT with a standardized and flexible DR strategy across all subsidiaries. “If there’s a disaster in one of the subsidiaries’ IT environments we have multiple recovery options: we can take an image from that subsidiary and move it to another location or put it into the cloud so users can connect, or put it on a physical device at corporate and enable the subsidiary to connect via VPN or load the images on a physical device until the failed hardware is replaced and put the image back into the affected subsidiary’s network,” said Robert.

An endpoint disaster the team encountered and quickly resolved with Druva inSync was caused by a Windows 10 update that took out the database of one it’s subsidiaries. “We had that machine backing up to Druva inSync, which enabled us to fully recover the data in about 10 minutes without any loss. Without Druva inSync, it would have taken up to 12 hours to recreate all this information,” he said.

Endpoints are backed up wherever the user is, and Robert’s team can manage backups of endpoints, VMs, and physical servers from anywhere in the world. Druva’s built-in global deduplication, which is delivering a 24X reduction on storage for its VM data, is helping the team to achieve cost efficiencies. “The ROI on the Druva solution —  we have found that just one hour of downtime in our previous Veeam environment pays for the Druva Cloud Platform,” said Robert.