Druva Employs AWS to Provide Backup and Recovery for VMware

2016 Cloud Security Trends: Confidence on the Rise

One of the most common forms of hybrid cloud computing is VMware running on premise and the flavor of virtual machines that Amazon Web Services (AWS) makes available using open source Xen hypervisors. Because both environments build on fundamentally different virtual machine architectures, using AWS as an extension of a VMware environment has until recently been a challenge.

But now that AWS has opened up more of the application programming interfaces (APIs) surrounding its virtual machine, that’s about to change. One of the first vendors to take advantage of this change is Druva, a provider of backup and recovery services hosted on AWS that is now extending that capability to add support for VMware.

Druva CEO Jaspreet Singh says that rather than having to back up files locally and then move them into the cloud, the Druva Phoenix service is designed to continuously stream data from VMware or a physical server directly into AWS. In the event of a disaster, IT organizations can spin up AWS virtual machines to provide access to that data in a matter of minutes.

By definition, Singh says, the cloud provides a more agile approach to disaster recovery that eliminates the need for acquiring and maintaining massive amounts of data protection software and hardware on premise. Rather than waiting to recover data from the cloud, Druva Phoenix provides the ability to keep applications running without any interruption to the business until the IT organization can move data back on premise.

Of course, not every application workload is critical enough to warrant this level of continuity. But for some mission-critical applications, every minute of downtime generally costs the business more than it can afford.