Revolution Company replaces Backupify and HPE with Druva to protect business-critical data

Revolution Company is a global brand focused on promoting a sustainable environment. It is transforming the plastics industry with its closed-loop system allowing it to control how its products are recycled and manufactured. Revolution Company recovers, cleans, and processes plastic materials to maintain the smallest carbon footprint possible. Spanning nearly every industry, its family of brands delivers sustainable, high-quality plastic products to both consumers and companies alike.

Revolution Company has turned plastic recycling into big business with an active mergers and acquisitions (M&A) strategy. This expansion added extra pressure on its IT infrastructure, and soon the company’s data center had to be rebuilt from the ground up, according to Phil Collins, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Revolution.

“When I joined, we were projected to double every two years, but instead, we doubled in nine months.” At the time, the company used HPE SimpliVity for data retention supporting VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Company data was replicated on VMs between two data centers — with two nodes at the primary center in Arkansas, and another node at the secondary data center in Texas. When Phil decided to consolidate all data to the Texas data center, he had to reevaluate data security, especially since the data center held core company data, such as SQL databases.

Additionally, the team migrated to Microsoft 365 and deployed Backupify for its Exchange Online and OneDrive data for the company’s 425 users. While this worked initially, the team started encountering data restoration failures and poor vendor support. “I couldn’t depend on them. I would try to restore something and it wouldn’t work. The support team took days to respond.”

Backupify was also retaining unnecessary data. Even after Phil repeatedly asked for inactive users to be removed, he was still being charged for them. “We were overpaying by 25 percent,” he said.

For Phil, securing the data for data center workloads running on VMs was top priority. Looking for an alternative, he talked to Commvault, Veeam, and Druva. Commvault was ruled out since it didn’t meet his requirements. While Veeam looked promising initially, Phil said, “Going with Veeam meant I would have had to provision servers for storage and backups. That on-premises server would have to do local backups, then send those backups to the cloud. It didn’t make sense.”

Cloud-native Druva seemed like the ideal fit, so Phil conducted a proof of concept (POC). “When we saw Druva at work, it was obvious it did everything we needed,” Phil said. “It runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), meaning you can’t run executables in the space where our backups reside — so Druva gives us the ransomware protection we need.”

Switching to Druva was frictionless. “The customer support was unbelievable,” Phil said. “They walked with me every step of the way and made sure I was 100 percent comfortable.”

The frictionless VM move prompted Phil to look to Druva for securing the company’s Microsoft 365 data. “When I saw how easy it was to use Druva with our data center, and how well the support team took care of us, it was a no-brainer to expand Druva to protect our cloud data too. I honestly couldn’t be happier with how everything has gone.”

Now Phil has robust data protection and recovery capabilities for VMs and Microsoft 365 data. He can easily access snapshots of data and export it in bulk, which has made all the difference, as he has done two restores using Druva since switching. One of these was a 10 gigabyte (GB) mailbox, which only took one hour to restore.

He also has better protection against ransomware. “It’s hard to put a price on peace of mind, knowing everything is backed up,” Phil said. “I finally have the capability to restore at a granular level. Druva saves me so much time and money.”

He’s also confident he’s only backing up the data he needs. “The deduplication impressed me the most. Right now we’re showing a 10x deduplication rate,” Phil said. Plus, he gets cost-effective protection with award-winning customer support. “With Backupify, I got locked out of my account because of an authentication error,” Phil said. “It took Backupify customer support days to get back to me, and one week to get access to backups. With Druva, I always get a response the same day.”

He also spends 93 percent less time managing backups. “With Druva, I spend maybe five minutes. It’s as simple as scrolling through a status update email each day.”

Going forward, Phil plans to introduce non-IT members of staff to the Druva console for self-service access. That will give staff an instant solution, saving valuable time and resources for his lean IT team.