Suez Water Technologies & Solutions protects data center and AWS workloads with Druva

Suez Water Technologies & Solutions solves the toughest water and process challenges wherever they occur. It brings together experienced professionals and advanced technologies to solve the world’s most complex challenges related to water scarcity, quality, productivity, the environment, and energy.

When one of GE’s business units, GE Water, was acquired by Suez Water Technologies & Solutions, Suez’s IT department faced a huge task. It needed to move data on 60 servers — VMware virtual machines (VMs) and physical file servers — off of GE’s network and onto its own network, before finding a way to back up that data. The timeline to do so was aggressive which did not give the team time to acquire and deploy traditional infrastructure. More importantly, the team’s ultimate goal was to move as much infrastructure to the cloud as possible.

Suez IT was already using the public cloud — Amazon Web Services (AWS) — running its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system SAP on Oracle and SQL server in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) to run MySQL, Oracle, and SQL databases.

Suez works with a managed service provider (MSP) to back up its AWS workloads, but database administrators (DBAs) took as many snapshots as they needed, resulting in snapshot sprawl and escalating storage costs. Additionally, the team had challenges meeting recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).

According to Cloud Infrastructure Services Leader, Timothy Loranger, the team needed a more efficient, cost effective way of managing its data. “Our company was taking a plethora of snapshots, and we didn’t have visibility or retention control, so our costs continued to escalate. Additionally, our backups weren’t centrally managed, so it was a challenge to know how much storage we actually needed,” said Loranger.

Suez IT chose Druva to protect and centrally manage its data center and AWS workloads in the cloud. The Druva Cloud Platform gives Suez a single tool to protect, store, and recover business-critical workloads, including 90+ terabytes (TB) of Oracle on EC2, SQL on EC2, thousands of AWS instances, Amazon RDS workloads, and 50+ TB of NAS data.

Druva enabled Suez to reduce its database backup complexity with a unified solution. Its DBAs and backup teams have been able to improve RPO and RTO, and the team now has the visibility it needs to control snapshots and gain insight into its environment. “We’re able to right-size our environment simply by reviewing our Druva reports and taking the appropriate action,” said Loranger.

“It was a game changer when we learned application owners could restore Druva managed snapshots in an agnostic fashion using native AWS snapshot restore,” Loranger said. “If an owner has a restoration need, and they possess the rights in AWS, they can restore the Druva-managed snapshot directly in the AWS console,” he added.

Data migrations can be stressful, but Loranger credits Druva for a smooth transition. “Druva was so supportive throughout the process,” Loranger said. “We think of Druva staff as stakeholders. Yes, we’re the customer, but we very much work as a collaborative team.”

Now Suez Water Technologies & Solutions has a central place to manage all its backups — offering greater control and visibility.

“Choosing Druva was the smartest decision we could have made,” Loranger said. “In less than a year, we cut our Amazon EBS costs in half.” Before Druva, the team paid to store 600TB in Amazon EBS. “Thanks to the visibility Druva offers relating to all backups — VMs, physical file servers, Oracle and SQL databases, and EC2 instances — we were able to cut our backups in half, and, leveraging Druva’s solution for Oracle, achieve a four times reduction in EBS storage consumption,” he said.

“Not only did Druva help us determine how much storage we were wasting with excessive Amazon EBS snapshots, but it helped us realize the unnecessary surplus of Amazon EBS,” Loranger said. “We were able to work with our application and database owners to cut down EBS storage without sacrificing access to data by storing data in the Druva cloud, and leveraging its long-term retention capabilities. Now, we’re so much more efficient and only pay for what we actually need,” he said.

It’s not just storage that’s more efficient. The team achieved a six times reduction in resources needed to manage backups — thanks to the centralized, streamlined Druva Cloud Platform. That gives Loranger’s team more time to support the business. “We’ve saved money and improved team efficiency across the board,” Loranger said. “Overall, with Druva we cut our TCO by 50 percent — and even more than that when you factor in cost avoidance.”

Going forward, the team is moving to Druva’s new Oracle direct-to-cloud backup capability to improve efficiencies even further.