RelyOn Nutec adopts a cloud-first data protection strategy with Druva

RelyOn Nutec provides safety and survival training and services, helping organizations in oil and gas, maritime, and wind and industrial, improve safety for their employees and their customers. From its Copenhagen headquarters and 33 sites around the world, they serve 10,000+ companies every year, from the sole employee contractor to some of the biggest companies in the high-risk industries across the world.

RelyOn Nutec was recently spun out of parent company Falck Safety Services, which had been using Veritas’ legacy NetBackup solution. As Global IT Project Manager, Gavin Bell said, “NetBackup took a lot of management and much time was spent checking on backups every day. We often had to dedicate time to resolving issues with clients, and we had no visibility into about 80% of the network.”

To deliver safety training and survival services to 10,000+ companies in 33 countries, Gavin needed to implement a robust data protection solution. “I had a brand new network to build for RelyOn Nutec, so when it came time to find a backup and recovery solution for 50+ terabytes of Windows file server and AWS data, I immediately started looking at alternative solutions.” 

The solution needed to provide full data visibility and accessibility. Top of mind for Gavin and team was to have a cost-efficient, cloud-native solution that would have a lower TCO versus legacy systems.

“We did a pilot with Druva and our lean team was able to quickly get it up and running. The fact that Druva sits within AWS was the main reason we implemented it, as all of our local Windows file server data at each site is replicated to Amazon,” said Gavin.

With Druva, RelyOn Nutec adopted a “cloud-first” strategy and migrated data protection for their Windows file servers to the cloud. This unique cloud-native approach dramatically improved data visibility and delivered a single control pane so IT could easily recover server data down to the file level.

Ease of management was also a refreshing surprise for the team. “The Druva interface itself is pretty much idiot-proof. You can literally create an account, give the individual access to it, and they can be up and running without any training. It’s very user intuitive,” added Gavin.

“With Druva, all of our backups are visible in one dashboard. Previously, we had to check a lot of different agents to see backup status, which required physically logging into each server or scanning through emails to see which backups completed and which failed.”

“The Druva dashboard allows us to see all 40 Windows server backups in a couple of seconds,” said Gavin.

Because RelyOn Nutec delivers the same courses in many different countries, a lot of their data is duplicated. Gavin said, “The deduplication that Druva delivers has reduced our backup volume by about 62 times. Because of this, we’re actually backing up 40% more servers in the cloud than what we had originally planned.”

“With Druva, we use the restore functionality instead of migrating data across the network because it’s much quicker for an endpoint to go direct to AWS,” said Gavin. Druva enables them to recover on-prem (failback) or in the cloud (failover) across any AWS region.

“When users move across geographic locations, we do a file-level restore where we overwrite or redirect to a different location. It’s worked faultlessly. I’ve not had a restore which has failed. Druva has been outstanding for both disaster recovery and restoring data, which improves our operational efficiency.

“I’ve done a full backup of a Windows server with about 60 gigabytes of data and a small application installed on it. The backup took about eight minutes, which was astounding. I don’t think you can get any better than that to be honest.”

“Even when we’re adding a new server onto the network, it’s never a full backup because we’ve already got the same operating system on Druva. This has allowed us to save over 30 hours per month on backups, which is huge compared to the troublesome systems we had before, like NetBackup,” he stated.