Druva has expanded its SaaS data protection portfolio to include Amazon’s EC2 with combined snapshot, backup, and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities.
This service provides secure, air-gapped backups to protect against ransomware with a 50 per cent lower TCO (total cost of ownership) than Amazon’s services, Druva said. The air-gapping is virtual in that the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) data is stored in Druva’s own AWS storage account and not in a physically separate offline tape cartridge.
David Gildea, Druva VP of product, said in a statement: “By combining critical snapshot, backup, and disaster recovery capabilities in a single seamless interface, AWS customers can significantly increase their data resilience, reduce costs, and ideally position their company for future cloud growth.”
AWS provides its own basic EC2 data protection service, snapshotting the underlying EBS (Elastic Block Store) volume with an initial full snapshot and then adding incremental change snapshots. It also has the AWS Backup Service which covers entire EC2 instances, not just EBS volumes, as well as the RDS, DynamoDB, and EFS services.
Druva says it does more for less money by combining snapshots, backup, and DR into a single service with the air-gapped backups. These are not part of Amazon’s standard EBS snapshot service and users can get the same protection level by paying for extra AWS operations.
The Druva play includes source side global deduplication and automated cold-storage tiering for long-term retention. There is a central Druva management facility for tens to thousands of AWS accounts through which point-in-time restores can be made across AWS regions and accounts, taking only minutes, Druva claims.
There are several Druva competitors selling EC2 protection, including Clumio, Commvault Metallic, and HPE’s Zerto unit. We put a quick table together comparing these data protection products. Clumio, Druva, Metallic, and Zerto protect more than just AWS’s EC2 environment, but we’re focusing only on EC2 here:
Clumio sells EC2 snapshots and backup but not disaster recovery. Metallic is backup without snapshots or DR. Zerto is DR and backup without snapshots. All these suppliers use a virtual air gap as protection against ransomware.
Druva says it provides combined snapshot orchestration for fast, operational recovery, secure, air-gapped backups for ransomware protection, and AWS cloud-based DR so customers no longer need any extra software or hardware or a second data centre to provide DR for applications running in EC2 instances, or elsewhere in the IT environments that Druva protects, such as Microsoft 365, Oracle, Microsoft SQL, AWS databases, VMware and Hyper-V servers, NAS, Windows, and Linux servers.
Think of Druva’s EC2 product as another brick in its wall of SaaS-based data protection suites, and expect its in-cloud coverage to expand further over time. It has yet to tap the Azure and Google markets, but it can and probably will.
Grab a datasheet here. Druva’s cloud backup for EC2 will be generally available via the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud this spring.
