Phillips Distilling crafts data management with Druva

Since 1912, Phillips Distilling Company has been producing high-quality spirits and popular alcoholic beverage brands. Based in Minnesota, it is one of America’s oldest family-owned spirits companies and has a proven commitment to innovation, quality and community. With over 300 employees, Phillips Distilling produces and sells millions of cases of alcohol worldwide every year.

Phillips Distilling was faced with the arduous task of backing up their critical data to tape, collecting all those tapes each week, physically delivering them to a bank and storing them in a safe deposit box. “We had a frequency of one week, so if anything bad happened, we could have potentially lost seven or eight days’ worth of data,” said David Knutson, Phillips Distilling’s database administrator. In addition, their data footprint was heavily impacted because of the equipment needed to perform these tape backups. Each week, the team was spending between 20 to 30 hours managing the backup process and delivering the boxes of tape to the bank.

With many employees frequently traveling, a lot of critical end-user data from laptops and mobile devices data was also not being stored and backed up on the network. “We were having issues with sales laptops (used by) the people that move around frequently,” said Joan Stevens, director of IT at Phillips “they were having failures, so we were not backing their laptops up and we were having problems with getting the data.” Compounding this issue was the fact that, when laptops needed to be restored or replaced, the process would be unnecessarily slow, difficult and unsecure.

Another major challenge was the high volume of data that the IT team needed to manage. Their servers regularly froze up and backups were not completed in a timely fashion. It could take hours or, in some instances, days to retrieve files. Phillips Distilling needed solutions that could eliminate the manual work of their data storage, recovery and backup and do it in an efficient and secure way. That’s where Druva came in.

After implementing Druva, Phillips Distilling dramatically increased the availability and visibility of business-critical data — both in its data center and across its employee devices — while reducing cost, risk and complexity. They can now easily restore critical information to servers as well as replace laptops, with everything fully restored immediately.

“For the end users, the use of inSync has been seamless,” says Stevens. “The biggest use case is when we do laptop replacements. We’ll use those restores to put their full system back on for them and then we ship it all ready to go.”

With high-performance server backup by Druva, Phillips Distilling has achieved a deduplication rate of 15 to 1, and backups and restores take less than 30 minutes, as compared to many hours or days with legacy solutions. Druva delivers data availability and governance for Phillips Distilling with a unique cloud-first approach. Everything is stored in the cloud — seamlessly, automatically and securely.

Druva Phoenix enables us to take our old tape library and system, along with its fees for maintenance and support, and get rid of it.”

— David Knutson, Database Administrator at Phillips Distilling Co.