Datrium Cloud DVX for AWS Offers Recovery Services for VMs Running in DVX On-Premises

Datrium, Inc. announced Cloud DVX, a cloud-native instance of DVX that offers recovery services for VMs running in DVX on-premises.

Cloud DVX includes global cloud deduplication and provides a simple and efficient approach to VM and vDisk level backup and recovery available within a converged or hyperconverged infrastructure system offering.

Adoption of the public cloud for offsite backup and recovery has been a challenge because the size of backup data, the need for regular full backups, and the lack of adequate data reduction limits the economic and practical viability of doing so. According to Gartner, Inc. ⁽¹⁾, “deduplication is the key to reducing cloud storage costs, but most backup software’s cloud connectors do not support deduplication, and other choices are limited to a few cloud gateways and emerging integrated backup appliances with native cloud gateway function.” The report goes on to state, “deduplication backup target appliances don’t support cloud storage as another tier without running a virtual edition in the cloud, which would incur additional cloud compute costs and more-expensive associated storage.“

Cloud DVX is a port of the DVX software to Amazon Web Services (AWS), and is a natural architectural fit. The first service available on Cloud DVX is a SaaS-based utility that runs on AWS, providing VM and vDisk backup and recovery for on-premises DVX systems. Beyond as-a-service simplicity, this service offering delivers global cloud deduplication and forever incremental backups to minimise the cost of capacity and network bandwidth. Granular, dedupe-aware recovery also provides accelerated RTO versus other AWS S3-based offerings.

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Simple service sidesteps AWS learning curve
Cloud DVX eliminates the need to learn and setup AWS, deal with EC2 service outages, and manually handle software upgrades. The recovery service provides a one-click setup with AWS, then provides backup instance storage and recovery as a SaaS-based offering. As a part of the service, the company manages service availability. The service also includes automated software upgrades as well as proactive support related to AWS resources.

Because Cloud DVX provides direct-to-host restore, the management (and cost) of an additional on-premises backup or cloud gateway device is eliminated, simplifying public cloud backup and recovery.

Cloud economics depend on global cloud deduplication and forever-incrementals
Cloud DVX provides global cloud deduplication for AWS S3 across multiple protection groups, multiple on-premises DVX systems, and even across multiple sites. In addition, because Cloud DVX supports forever-incremental backups, no additional full backups are required after initial seeding. The differential, dedupe-aware snapshot backup service means that customers maintain data efficiency both on-the-wire and at-rest. In addition, because this service supports end-to-end encryption, there is no need to add a separate VPN and related AWS charges.

This massive focus on data and network efficiency means that AWS resources are 65% lower ⁽²⁾ and 91% lower versus the S3-based products from hyperconverged and hyperconverged backup vendors, respectively.

“As a financial services company, we need to retain data for up to 25-30 years for parts of our business and have been reliant upon tape to do so,” said Daryl Dressler, infrastructure engineer, Intuition LLC. “In the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, we needed to recover from tape held at Iron Mountain. However tape deliveries are best effort and with all the flooding that had occurred, the delivery trucks were unable to reach our data center for days. With the dedupe-aware efficiency of Datrium Cloud Backup for AWS, we can cost-effectively deploy it as a tape replacement and reduce recovery time in these situations.“

DVX systems

Fast RTO depends on dedupe-aware data retrieval and direct-to-host restore
The combination of dedupe on-the-wire with granular recovery of an individual vDisk, improves recovery time. As an example, recovering a 100GB vDisk in the cloud may require retrieval of just a few gigabytes of data and just seconds, thanks to duplicate data in the local DVX.

Because of the global on-premises and cloud deduplication capabilities of DVX, Cloud DVX provides an RTO more than 2X faster than Nutanix Cloud Connect. In addition, RTO benefits from direct-to-host restore. With independent backup products, data must first be restored to the backup system, fully rehydrated, and incremental backups replayed, before it is copied to the primary system. Because DVX combines tier 1 application consolidation with built-in data protection offering direct-to-host restore, Cloud DVX delivers 2X faster RTO compared to HCI backup vendors.

“I was looking for a cost-effective approach to offsite data protection for our research data,” said Jeff Cunningham, director, information systems, Agricultural and Resource Economics (AREC) department, University of Maryland. “Datrium Cloud Backup was so simple to use, but I was interested in profiling the restore speed over our network. When I performed recovery testing, I was blown away – it was virtually instantaneous because Datrium took advantage of the fact that most of the VM data being recovered was already on my local system.“

“Cloud should be the new Iron Mountain, but it’s not. Most cloud backup approaches are still complex, expensive and slow,” said Brian Biles, CEO and founder, Datrium. “Datrium’s Cloud DVX recovery service is the first approach that really addresses these issues.“

U.S. list pricing for the Cloud DVX recovery service is $6,000 per 5TB per year, and is available within 60 days.

⁽¹⁾ Gartner: Is Cloud Storage the New Tape? Pushan Rinnen, Refreshed: 6 January 2017 | Published: 21 March 2016
⁽²⁾ Based on daily snapshots of 40TB of data with a 2% per day change rate over a one year period. AWS resources for Datrium were calculated to be $15.500 versus $44.500 and $179,000 for S3-based HCI and HCI Backup, respectively.