It reminds me of when DuPont came out with TI-Pure. Titanium dioxide is used to whiten everything, and for a long time, everybody’s titanium dioxide was the same. DuPont spent 10 years in R&D to create a new version of this chemical, and eventually released it as TI-Pure. It was significantly more effective than the competitors’ products, at a fraction of their price. Competitors actually sued DuPont for charging so little for its product. DuPont representatives explained to the judge how their R&D had made the product more efficient and less expensive, and the case was thrown out.
If someone is interested in a cloud-native data management solution, and they compare Druva’s solution and cost to our competitors’ offerings, they will find that Druva has the strongest solution by far. And since so many people are starting to see the world from a cloud-centric perspective, I believe that Druva’s time has come.
A True Cloud Design
I wrote an entire blog on this important subject, but let me attempt to summarize it here. In my experience, every other solution that attempts to back up your data center to the cloud does so by putting software in cloud virtual machines (VMs) associated with your account. These might be VMs hosted in a private cloud run by the vendor, or they might simply be public cloud VMs that you set up and manage. The point is that when you sign up, these VMs are created just for you. It’s a classic example of how not to use the cloud — by just running your data center software in a VM in the cloud. You get almost none of the advantages of the cloud by doing that, and you get all of the disadvantages. Most importantly, your cost will be higher than if you just ran the same software in your data center.
When you use Druva, however, there are no VMs or physical machines directly associated with your account. Druva’s service is run on giant clusters of nodes that are dynamically allocated to you at the time of your backup. We have authorization nodes, storage nodes, the S3 service, and the DynamoDB service. S3 and DynamoDB are managed by Amazon, but the true money-saver is that the number of authorization nodes and storage nodes that Druva runs at any given time are dynamically scaled up and down to meet the needs of our customers at any given moment. This gives our product unlimited power, while only paying for such power as we need it. This means our customers never pay for compute that they do not use, and they never pay for storage that they do not use. Our competitors’ customers, on the other hand, pay for VMs that are running all day long, even when backups are not running, and they pay for storage as they provision it, instead of as they use it. It’s many of the disadvantages of traditional data center infrastructure just moved into the cloud.
The Best Deduplication
Anyone who has architected a deduplication system has most likely discovered that a good starting point when sizing storage for such a system is 2X the original data footprint. For example, if you were attempting to back up a 100 TB data center, you would need to start with a 200 TB appliance. Druva, on the other hand, would back up that same data center with an average of around 70 TB. Storage is one of the biggest costs of a backup system, so the fact that Druva can back up the same amount of data as our competitors in less than half the storage is a huge savings for our customers. Since Druva, like other companies in the space, charges you only for the globally deduplicated data, the fact that we store it in less than half what the competition needs is a big deal.
Simply the Best Choice
Druva is the only cloud-native service that protects data centers, endpoints, SAS applications, and cloud workloads. Our use of the cloud and our advanced deduplication reduce the cost of our solution to our customers.
Every study I look at says that an increasing number of customers are moving applications to the cloud every day. The more an application makes sense in the cloud, the sooner it will get moved there. Druva is a true cloud solution that takes advantage of every positive aspect of the cloud, while simultaneously making one of the most difficult tasks in the data center a piece of cake. This is why I believe that Druva’s time has come — and it’s also the reason why I joined the company.
To learn more visit our Druva Cloud Platform solutions page.
