Druva Phoenix Transforms Server Backup and Secondary Storage

Druva, Inc. released a public cloud backup and long-term storage solution – Druva Phoenix – that eliminates tape, off-site storage, complexity and 70% of the costs of managing server backup, archiving, retention and recovery.

Phoenix unifies hot, warm and cold backup and archiving processes and administration, offers unlimited retention unavailable from any other cloud backup provider, and backups and restores 20 times faster than other solutions to ensure that organisations meet their recovery objectives and minimise business impact.

Available for remote/branch office servers with data centre servers to follow, Druva Phoenix offers an practical alternative to the traditional server backup model requiring backup to secondary storage, tape and then long-term offsite archiving. This multi-tiered approach is a cumbersome process with significant technical challenges, multiple administrative consoles, and reported recovery failure rates as high as 20%. The problem is compounded by tight IT budgets, a shortage of IT admins, and – in the case of remote and branch offices – limited local IT staff or none at all.

Druva Phoenix leverages patented deduplication technology, decreasing cloud storage costs, bandwidth availability, and the advanced cloud technologies of Amazon Web Services to provide a simplified model that delivers backup, archiving and long-term retention in a single package. Organisations gain the additional benefit of centralised management of server backup and recovery across any number of remote servers and locations.

“Improving backup and recovery is one of the top priorities cited by IT professionals who participated in ESG’s 2014 IT Spending Intentions Survey, and the use of public cloud services continues to grow in prioritisation and adoption. Cloud-services gives organisations of all sizes a new economic model and viable site for broader data protection coverage than they’ve ever had before,” said Jason Buffington, data, protection analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Cloud-based data protection has fundamentally changed the way people protect endpoint data, and remote-offices / small-businesses are the obvious next step in the evolution of cloud-powered data protection.“

Key features of Druva Phoenix that deliver that change include:

• Unified backup and archiving – Phoenix’s integrated approach to hot, warm and cold backup and archiving makes legacy multi-tier systems as well as the use of tapes and off-site storage obsolete. Ever-incremental backups remove the need for companies to manage periodic full backups, and all processes are centrally managed from a single console, dramatically reducing IT overhead.

• Infinite retention and faster recovery – Global deduplication optimises storage so that organisations can store limitless recovery points and archive and retain their data for as long as required – into decades if needed – to meet regulatory and compliance mandates. Recovery is also reduced from several days to hours with no worries about tape failures.

• 20X faster backups – Phoenix delivers direct-to-cloud backup and restore speeds of 100Mb/s – 20 times faster than other solutions – utilising the latest in object storage coupled with parallelised data transfers. It can realise up to 1Gb/s-effective WAN throughput with the added efficiencies provided by deduplication. Sites with large data sets, limited bandwidth or demanding RTOs can utilise Phoenix CloudCache, an on-site soft appliance that provides hot LAN-speed backups and restores via local caching with staggered transfers to the cloud to free up real-time bandwidth.

• 70% cost savings – Phoenix eliminates the expense of tape, secondary storage and IT backup and recovery management by centralising policy and administrative management of hot, warm and cold storage in the cloud.

• Trusted public cloud infrastructure – The use of Amazon Web Services ensures that customer data is maintained in today’s highest rated and most secure public cloud infrastructure and protected by a full range of system certifications including SOC1, SOC2, SOC3 and ISO-27001.

“We knew we wanted to move our backup to a cloud solution, and Phoenix offered critical advantages like unlimited archiving, no need to pay for backing up the same data over and over, centralised management of all processes, and the use of Amazon AWS as a backend,” said Jose Ortiz, systems administrator, TechFlow. “We are eliminating a lot of manual processes, reducing errors, and doing restores in a few hours versus the few days it used to take to get a tape back from our outside vault. It’s much more efficient and very easy to administer.“

“The traditional backup-to-tape-to-archive process is expensive, resource-intensive and subject to error, with 75% of organisations experiencing tape failure in the last year. The cloud is clearly a better choice, but current cloud-based solutions have serious limitations ranging from slow speeds and limited data retention to failure to utilise the distributed nature of the cloud to perform large-scale backups,” said Jaspreet Singh, CEO, Druva. “By leveraging the technology we developed for our inSync endpoint backup platform as well as our five years of experience with the AWS public cloud, Phoenix offers a truly disruptive alternative that eliminates tape and makes the cloud a viable choice for server backup for the first time.“