With a geographically dispersed workforce coordinating business-critical activities across various time zones, the GulfMark Offshore IT team didn’t have a standardized process for backing up their files. “We had five different backup technologies across the globe, and there were many places to look to see what was going on. It’s just harder to manage that way,” says Kevin Adams, global IT infrastructure manager at GulfMark Offshore.
GulfMark Offshore has as many as 15 virtual machines (VMs) per site, has data stored in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and even has servers on their offshore supply vessels that can be at sea for up to three weeks at a time. Before adopting the Druva solution, when a server went down, data recovery was a long manual process that took many days to complete — creating significant disruption for those who relied on the data for normal operations. Because regional teams were using different backup solutions, successfully managing this global, dynamic, and complex infrastructure was nearly impossible. “In one region, we thought we had fully retired tapes, only to discover they were literally still storing tape in a safe,” recalls Kevin.
To improve its productivity and agility, GulfMark Offshore needed a centralized data protection and recovery solution that could streamline their data recovery process, as well as scale up with the company’s rapid growth. After thorough market research and proof of concept testing, GulfMark Offshore found its go-to solution with Druva Phoenix.