PALL Corporation unifies backup and disaster recovery with Druva

Port Washington, NY based Pall Corporation has business operations that span the globe. Pall provides a rich portfolio of advanced filtration, separation, and purification equipment and services, but with such widespread operations and services, they faced a daunting challenge to efficiently manage all of the data. Its siloed legacy systems were due for an upgrade with a staggering $1.2M pricetag, which still required IT managers to manually manage a collection of tape backups and disaster recovery systems.

Taking Control of Remote Office Data
Jessica Fletcher, Pall’s IT Analyst Supervisor, is charged with overseeing the company’s data management, said the cost and time spent on these manual backups soon became untenable as the company recognized the need to consolidate its multiple systems into a unified platform.

They had to monitor IT staff who handled thousands of tapes generated by Pall’s operations. “Rather than having 50 people touching 50 different servers every day to check backups and handle tapes at different sites throughout our company, we wanted to cut out all the moving parts and reduce cost—the tapes, the tape drives, and the transportation of the tapes,” Fletcher explained. Their initial attempts at replacing this system with a hosted solution however, ended with 1TB of data being completely lost, and a frustrating lack of clarity on who was to blame as the provider and AWS pointed fingers at each other.

To address these challenges, Pall Corporation wanted a solution that had the industry proven AWS infrastructure as a back end. In addition Pall did not want multiple vendors to manage given the challenges they had previously with data loss. They aimed to consolidate management of these backup systems into a single cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution with rock-solid security guarantees. After testing several solutions, they chose Druva Phoenix.

Through cloud provisioning, Pall is now able to limit regional access in line with various government and industry standards. The global deduplication capability helped them to dramatically cut costs and reduce the footprint of their backup data. Pall reduced its storage footprint by 20 percent, and customer access to storage was accelerated.

“Cost savings really comes for us when we don’t have to buy tapes, not pay to maintain hardware and not ship it offsite,” Fletcher said. “Our policy is that our tape backup unit basically gets refreshed or replaced every three years. So, every three years, each site was spending … somewhere between $6,000 and $12,000.”

Pall Corp restores a file from each and every server to verify their systems are working. This process takes on average 2 hours across all 30 sites. By moving to Druva Phoenix’s cloud-based system, Pall’s teams are now also experiencing significantly faster recovery access across their remote locations. “One of our managers just restored a 13-meg file in 42 seconds,” Fletcher said. “If that was still loaded into an appliance, he would have had to login in the machine, find out which tape it was, drill down into it, and restore from the tape. It probably would have taken up about 20 minutes, and if it was offsite, it would have taken a whole day; and this took him 42 seconds to restore the data.”

Finally, Druva’s professional services team enabled Pall to get the most out of their Phoenix deployment while saving IT time and resources. “The service team is fantastic,” Fletcher said. “I wished they could have then become our own professional services guys.”

We were really looking for a cloud solution all along..for disaster recovery we cannot have something simply be onsite.”

— Jessica Fletcher, IT Analyst Supervisor, Pall Corporation