Druva CloudRanger leverages AWS automation capabilities with enhanced DR, search and compliance functionality

Just in time for AWS Re:Invent next week, Druva CloudRanger, the AWS-focused component within the Druva data protection portfolio, has unveiled new enhancements, which they will be displaying at the event.

David Gildea, vice president of product and general manager at Druva CloudRanger

Cloud data protection vendor Druva has announced that Druva CloudRanger, the AWS-focused data protection company which it acquired in June of this year, has significantly enhanced its capabilities with new provisions for advanced automated disaster recovery, file level search and legal hold abilities for data governance. Druva CloudRanger operates as a separate organization within Druva. The announcement was specifically timed for the AWS Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas next week.

“These enhancements are all things that we have been developing at CloudRanger,” said David Gildea, vice president of product and general manager at Druva CloudRanger, who was CloudRanger’s original founder and CEO. “These ideas were there before we were acquired, but Druva provided the resources to accelerate their development, and we also had the advantage of being able to draw on their experience.”

Druva CloudRanger was acquired because it was a stronger product than Apollo, the internal product Druva had developed for the AWS market. Customers told Druva that they were moving to cloud in a more aggressive fashion that Druva had estimated, so the acquisition became necessary for reasons of speed to market. Druva saw CloudRanger as a good fit because they were cloud-native, like Druva, and were focused around AWS APIs rather than software.

“These enhancements we are announcing leverage our ability to take advantage of the work that AWS is doing,” Gildea said. “We will be talking about them at AWS Re:Invent. It’s a great chance to educate the market more about Druva CloudRanger.”

Gildea said that the enhanced disaster recovery comes from Druva CloudRanger’s ability to work well with AWS’s inherent automation capabilities.

“The approach we have taken depends on AWS’s ability to let you automate as easily as possible, which we use in disaster recovery, and extend even beyond that scenario so that it becomes more of a DevOps tool,” he stated. “Our approach is not just about the data. It’s more broadly about the infrastructure, as we map the complexity from one region to another so that the user doesn’t have to worry about those complexities. That’s what is new here now, the ability to replicate and clone the entire environment in the whole AWS account, across regions. You pick your servers and we build out the infrastructure around it, so that you can map to any region with a one-click process in case of a disaster. This extends the value on top of the features that we built before, by using them in a very cloudish way.”

Enhanced automation is also the driver behind the new file search capabilities. The challenge being addressed is the need to identify files, primarily for compliance reasons, across massive databases that can easily be in the hundreds of terabytes.

“We use Amazon snapshotting rather than agents, so we can index all the snapshots without agents and greatly simplify your search across all of the snapshots you have created,” Gildea said. “It takes a second to search, where before it would have been a more manual and time-consuming process. This is especially powerful for something like GDPR regulations.”

The new automation of data governance capabilities combines the file search with legal hold functionality, to automate and simplify the identification, collection and preservation of targeted data across cloud workloads.

“This is something that has been available on-prem for a while, but is new in the cloud,” Gildea said. “The legal hold ability lets you pull in snapshots where you want to keep control of them, rather than push data into another account, which is common in the cloud with cross-account copies.”

CloudRanger had certain elements of functionality when they were acquired that Druva did not, like auto-discovery and tagging and support for resource optimization. Gildea indicated that that integration work of this technology into the legacy Druva offerings, Phoenix and InSync, has been ongoing since the companies came together, but is not yet complete.

“We are working on our APIs to make CloudRanger technology available on all of the Druva platform, but it is a long journey, and there is still a lot of work to make that it happen.”