Druva Review
Founded in 2008, California based Druva offers an enterprise storage solution with a reputation for excellence called InSync. Druva has offices worldwide that are based in Sunnyvale, Pune, Singapore, and London. They have received $42M in funding from Sequoia, Nexus and Tenaya. They currently support over 3,000 customers in over 70 countries across all industries, and it is not hard to see why they have received so many awards, including Gartner ranking them as #1 in both 2012 and 2013. What makes this storage service standout far above the competition is their architectural structure. It is built on a model of ‘nCube architecture’ that we would not do justice explaining here, but we would highly recommend reading up on it directly from Druva. Druva’s service is compatible on both public and private clouds, and we are more than happy to recommend them to all Enterprise users.
Features
A problem that enterprise users often face is, what do you do if your 1,000+ employees are all trying to backup their data simultaneously? Many providers will not be able to handle the overload and backup speed will s-l-o-w d-o-w-n dramatically. Druva has overcome this issue with “global deduplication”. With this, the original file is stored once, across all users; so if different users all receive the same email attachment, it would only be backed up once. Then, only the changes to that file are backed up going forward. This not only dramatically improves backup speeds, but it also minimizes demands on WAN bandwidth. Moreover, the bulk of the backup process will only occur during user downtime so it will optimize work traffic and provide a LAN-like performance for end-users. Other features include:
- WAN Optimization
- Complete data governance
- Enterprise File Sync & Share
- Enterprise Integration
- Distributed Cloud File System and a deeper AD integration
- Self-healing storage
- Intelligent data restore
Druvas software supports Windows, Mac and Linux, and is also compatible with OpenStack Swift, EMC Atmos, and ViPR.
Ease of Use
Druva provides one of the most easy to use services available for the enterprise market to-date. Deployment is extremely smooth, and as we mentioned before, every aspect of this service is designed to be at minimal inconvenience to the end-user. All backups and updates are on a fixed schedule with parameters for bandwidth maximization. The user interface is extremely well designed. All of your data is laid out clearly in a single view shot on your centralized console, thereby giving you complete visibility. You are able to clearly see all of your data usage and storage trends. Additionally, you are given all the tools you could possibly need, for maximum control of your data (and ultimately the most out of your cloud). This is achieved through a multifaceted centralized policy management. So for example, Druva has set up enhanced governance over litigation readiness with their legal hold. This enables legal administrators to initiate, release and manage legal holds over documents for different groups of custodians. This can be done on an individual level all the way through to a company-wide hold. Moreover, you are given audit trails so that you have complete details on all activities pertaining to legal holds, including policy management, account management, and data access.
Druva InSync DashBoard
Pricing
There are three packages on offer by Druva on a sliding scale. These are:
- Cloud Professional: $5 per month per user for 20GB storage
- Cloud Enterprise: $7-8 per month per user for 50-100GB storage
- Cloud Unlimited: the price is available by request for unlimited storage
Customer Support
Druva provides the full support package with phone, email, live chat and a client portal with a community forum where you can see answers given to problems other users have faced. Their representatives are extremely well versed, specifically because of their target audience (enterprise customers).
Security
As you would expect with an enterprise provider of this caliber, all files are secured with military grade 256-bit SSL transfer and AES encryption, in addition to secure HTTPS and LDAPs. All files are encrypted at the block level for deduplication ease. Put simply, the encryption is driven by the data so that any documents that contain the same data will be clearly identifiable and removed without Druva’s employees needing to see what the document contains. You are also provided with unique encryption key management and strict password controls, so you can decide who will be able to access the data.
Summary
Druva InSync is enterprise backup solution that is optimized for file sharing and supreme data management. They provide an impressive array of features and top level security. The whole service is intelligently designed for the benefit of all levels of users from information managers down to the end-user. They do offer a free trial, and we strongly recommend this service to all enterprise organizations.
