Tag Archives: druva

Druva Announces CloudRanger Acquisition

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Announcement

Druva recently announced that they’ve acquired CloudRanger. I had the opportunity to catch up with W. Curtis Preston about the news recently and thought I’d cover it briefly here.

 

What’s A CloudRanger?

Here’s the high-level view of the company:

  • Founded in 2016
  • Headquartered in Donegal, Ireland
  • 300+ Global Customers
  • 3x Growth in last 6 months
  • 100% Cloud native ‘as-a-Service’
  • Pay as you go pricing model
  • Biggest client creating 4,000 snapshots per day

 

Why CloudRanger?

Agentless Service

  • API Account IAM access ensures greater customer account security
  • Leverages AWS Quiescing capabilities
  • No account proxies (No additional costs, increased security)
  • No software needed to be updated

Broadest service coverage

  • Amazon EC2, EBS, RDS & RedShift
  • Automated Disaster Recovery (ADR)
  • Server scheduling for Amazon EC2 & RDS
  • SaaS based solution, compared to CPM server based approach
  • Easy to use platform for managing multiple AWS accounts
  • Featured SaaS product in AWS Marketplace available via SaaS contracts

Consumption Based Pricing Model

  • Pay as you go with full insight into data usage for cost predictability

 

A Good Fit

So where does CloudRanger fit in the broader Druva story? You’ll notice in the below picture that Apollo is missing. The main reason for the acquisition, as best I can tell, is that CloudRanger gives Druva the capability they were after with Apollo but in a much shorter timeframe.

[image courtesy of Druva]

 

Thoughts

A lot of customers want a lot of different things from their software vendors, particularly when it comes to data protection. A lot of companies have particular needs, and infrastructure protection is a complicated beast at the best of times. Sometimes it makes sense to try and develop these features for your customers. And sometimes it makes sense to go out and acquire those features. In this case, Druva has realised that CloudRanger gets them to a point in their product development far quicker than they may have gotten to under their own steam. The point of this acquisition isn’t that the good folks at Druva don’t have the chops to deliver what CloudRanger does already, but now they can move on to other platform enhancements. This does assume that the acquisition will go smoothly, but given that this doesn’t appear to be a hostile takeover, I’m assuming that part will go well.

Druva have done a lot of cool stuff recently, and I do like their approach to data protection (management?) that has differentiated itself from some of the more traditional approaches in the marketplace. CloudRanger gives them solid capability with AWS workloads, and I imagine Azure will be on the radar as well. I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out, and what impact it has on some of their competitors in the space.

Druva Is Useful, And Modern

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Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US.  My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

You can view the video of Druva‘s presentation here, and you can download a PDF copy of my rough notes from here.

 

DMaaS

Druva have been around for a while, and I recently had the opportunity to hear from them at a Tech Field Day Extra event. They have combined their Phoenix and inSync products into a single platform, yielding Druva Cloud Platform. This is being positioned as a “Data Management-as-a-Service” offering.

 

Data Management-as-a-Service

Conceptually, it looks a little like this.

[image via Druva]

According to Druva, the solution takes into account all the good stuff, such as:

  • Protection;
  • Governance; and
  • Intelligence.

It works with both:

  • Local data sources (end points, branch offices, and DCs); and
  • Cloud data sources (such as IaaS, Cloud Applications, and PaaS).

The Druva cloud is powered by AWS, and provides, amongst other things:

  • Auto-tiering in the cloud (S3/S3IA/Glacier); and
  • Easy recovery to any location (servers or the cloud).

 

Just Because You Can Put A Cat …

With everything there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. Sometimes you might do something and think that you’re doing it right, but you’re not. Wesley Snipes’s line in White Men Can’t Jump may not be appropriate for this post, but Druva came up with one that is: “A VCR in the cloud doesn’t give you Netflix”. When you’re looking at cloud-based data protection solutions, you need to think carefully about just what’s on offer. Druva have worked through a lot of these requirements and claim their solution:

  • Is fully managed (no need to deploy, manage, support software);
  • Offers predictable lower costs
  • Delivers linear and infinite (!) scalability
  • Provides automatic upgrades and patching; and
  • Offers seamless data services.

I’m a fan of the idea that cloud services can offer a somewhat predictable cost models to customers. One of the biggest concerns faced by the C-level folk I talk to is the variability of cost when it comes to consuming off-premises services. The platform also offers source side global deduplication, with:

  • Application-aware block-level deduplication;
  • Only unique blocks being sent; and
  • Forever incremental and efficient backups.

The advantage of this approach is that, as Druva charge based on “post-globally deduped storage consumed”, chances are you can keep your costs under control.

 

It Feels Proper Cloudy

I know a lot of people who are in the midst of the great cloud migration. A lot of them are only now (!) starting to think about how exactly they’re going to protect all of this data in the cloud. Some of them are taking their existing on-premises solutions and adapting them to deal with hybrid or public cloud workloads. Others are dabbling with various services that are primarily cloud-based. Worse still are the ones assuming that the SaaS provider is somehow magically taking care of their data protection needs. Architecting your apps for multiple geos is a step in the right direction towards availability, but you still need to think about data protection in terms of integrity, not just availability. The impression I got from Druva is that they’ve taken some of the best elements of their on-premises and cloud offerings, sprinkled some decent security in the mix, and come up with a solution that could prove remarkably effective.