CFD1 Prep: Druva

Druva is completely new to me, which is always fun.

A quick bit of research shows they’re aiming at the backup and recovery market, and the cloud angle comes from the software backing things up to either AWS or Azure. They appear to handle servers, VMs, endpoints (phones and tablets) as well as file sync and share, and cloud-based data like Office365, Salesforce.com, Google Docs, etc.

It looks like the secret sauce is some form of global deduplication to reduce the amount of data that needs to move over the WAN, which is an important hurdle that is often overlooked in bandwidth saturated places like the US (although tell that to T-mobile in the Valley, hah!).

There are two main sub-brands: Druva Insync, which seems to be the backup and recovery product aimed at laptops, mobile devices, and SaaS data, and Druva Phoenix, which looks like a more typical server type backup and DR type product that backs up servers and databases, and converts VMs into Amazon Machine Images so you can start them in the cloud if the primary goes pop. It looks like there’s an on-site version as well, but it’s called On-Premise, so automatic fail there.

The trouble is, I’m having trouble figuring out how Druva does all this. The Druva website is full of fluffy marketing writing, but is very short on actual details. It looks very slick and shiny, but there’s not a lot of depth here. I’ve even gone so far as to download some of the datasheets, but they’re similarly fluffy.

You can tell Druva Takes Security Seriously™ because of all the badges they have on their website. It’s certified secure! It’s enterprise grade! It uses something called Envelope Security, so I’m totally convinced.

I gave up some fake information to download a 451 Research analyst report from the website, which is more than a year old now, and it said that Druva came from endpoint backup land and was specialising in governance and chain-of-custody type legal hold stuff. That has a lot of appeal to executives with money, and I concur with the author of the report that this would contribute to Druva’s ability to differentiate and win large enterprise accounts.

The report appears to date from before right about the time Phoenix was added to the portfolio, and so server backup and DR was still very new for the company, as was the Office365 integration. That was over a year ago, so I’d expect quite a bit of progress has been made since, but I get the impression that the company marketing leading the product, certainly going by the website.

No doubt we’ll dig into the details during CFD1 and try to get some clearer answers about what Druva really does and what makes it special.

I swear, every time I turn around another four backup and recovery companies spring up as if from nowhere. There seem to be so very many lurking out there, it’s really hard to differentiate. Perhaps there will be a Great Reckoning, as is coming for the all the primary storage companies, and we’ll see some consolidation. I know there’s already been some, with EMC buying Spanning Backup, and Datto bought Backupify not too long ago, so perhaps the time of Reckoning is already looming.