National Raisin Company protects virtual machines, endpoints, and Microsoft 365 with Druva

To the National Raisin Company (NRC) dried fruit processing is an art and a science. The art is learned from experience, and it has over 45 years of it. Founded in 1969, NRC is the largest independent grower, processor, and packer of dried fruits in the United States, serving customers in the retail, industrial, and food-service sectors. It receives approximately 96 billion pounds of raisins each year — just about the number of stars in our galaxy.

For decades NRC’s traditional business was run on-premises, where its IT infrastructure was located and most of its staff, with the exception of sales people out in the field. In the late 2000s, it virtualized most of the IT infrastructure on VMware ESX servers, which ran business critical workloads, like enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and employee data applications.

NRC had implemented Quest Rapid Recovery running on a physical server to protect its VMs. But, as NRC’s VP of IT, Kevin Pennington, said, “Quest Rapid Recovery locked up our ERP for about 30 minutes every night, preventing our night shift team from recording their production processes and accessing needed information.”

Additional backup issues were encountered when Quest, running on old hardware, wasn’t properly backing up their ERP system. It also was not able to backup and secure NRC’s Microsoft 365 data. Unfulfilled requests to restore end user data mounted, which underscored the need for a data management solution that provided effective disaster recovery (DR).

NRC IT evaluated upgrading its Quest Rapid Recovery hardware and software to improve VM data protection, but found it to be expensive and inefficient as its business was modernizing. Kevin said, “I wanted a data protection solution my team could easily manage from anywhere in the world, and I knew it had to be cloud-based.”

“We were already protecting endpoints for our mobile sales force with Druva inSync, so extending our implementation with Druva Phoenix was the best way to achieve DR in the cloud without having to implement and manage DR infrastructure.”

NRC migrated data protection of its 29 VMs to Druva Phoenix, and, unlike its previous solution, it didn’t have to predict how much storage it would need and over-provision. “With Quest, if we needed to protect 15 terabytes (TBs) of data, we would have had to buy storage for 45 TBs. With Druva, the fact that we can grow over time is a huge advantage,” said Kevin.

Expanding its Druva implementation to protect its Microsoft 365 implementation was a natural extension according to Kevin. “With the Druva Cloud Platform, I now have a single pane of glass with which to manage our entire backup environment of VMs, endpoints, and Microsoft 365,” he said.

One of the biggest benefits NRC is getting from the Druva Cloud Platform is time savings. “Druva sends me an email every morning showing me the last two days of backups so I can see every single VM backup and scan it in minutes. From anywhere in the world I can log into the Druva dashboard and evaluate backup and restore status.

“With Quest Rapid Recovery, I used to spend at least an hour a day going through logs, checking backups, and making sure everything was functioning properly – and that was just for VMs. Since switching to Druva, in 15 minutes I can see 100% of VMs, endpoints, and Microsoft 365 backups,” said Kevin.

He added, “DR in the cloud was one of my goals that I’ve met with the Druva Cloud Platform. Before, our DR strategy was to rebuild the VMware cluster or restore the whole VM if it was viable. Now, we have one-click failover where our data is copied to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and restored within minutes.”

The Druva Cloud Platform gives NRC 24×7 access to backups for VMs, endpoints, and Microsoft 365 users. “I can do comparisons between backups and the live system and, if needed, show detailed audit trails to auditors to demonstrate that compliance guidelines are being met,” he added.