Druva Phoenix (UNPUBLISHED) vs. VMware Site Recovery (DRaaS)

Durva Phoenix is well suited for the VMware platform and has great restore functionality during disaster recovery. We use a different VM platform so our disaster recovery has a longer timeline if there is a critical failure as we need to get a base OS loaded before we can restore the VM data to it. This is the tradeoff between an expensive VM platform and a near free VM platform. Druva Phoenix is well suited to file version recovery if a previous data state is required by your employees or customers. Very quick to restore.

Incentivized

VMware Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery tools are well suited for customers who are heavily integrated with vSphere and VMs for their on-premises data centers today. VMware Cloud on AWS is great for customers who do not have DR sites and want to leverage the public cloud to build a DR site on demand quickly.

Incentivized

• The best part about Druva is that you deploy, which is fairly easy especially with your technical rep being available for the whole process, and then you let the system do your work. If a backup fails I get a report, there is no need to check it every day or even weekly.
• The file server backup is great. Searching is easy and the capability to pull back a full folder or individual file makes life a lot easier to support my end users.

Incentivized

• Integration with VMware environments
• Simple to use for current VMware admins

Incentivized

• The UI is good, but a bit inconsistent. Some types of backups are shown differently to others. It never gets in the way, but a bit more consistency would be good.
• The system is usage based, which is understandable, but a shock after using inSync, their other backup product, which is not. Careful planning and thought is needed if you are on a tight budget

Incentivized

• vSphere replication not as feature rich as storage replication
• Third party software necessary if looking into public cloud

Incentivized

Certain backup solutions can be cumbersome on how they actually work. Where that's properly deploying hardware or software that will house the backups. Druva is different where the software and infrastructure is completely managed. All we needed to do is deploy agents and proxies and point the backups to Druva Phoenix

Incentivized

It's been pretty easy to get a hold of the Support team and they work well to resolve our issues. I wish I could email support directly (which we used to be able to do) versus having to login to the console and report an issue from there, that's a feature I'd like to see brought back but otherwise, their Support team is pleasant to work with.

Incentivized

VMware support is typically outstanding, of course, they have multiple departments, and you need to work with the specific teams to get advanced support for things specific to VMware Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery. In contrast, other companies that deal directly with that technology may be more responsive to those specifics. Typically VMware is excellent and helpful in critical outages. For smaller to medium issues, it can take some time to get addressed appropriately.

Incentivized

Druva stacks up well against its competitors. I do not remember it being at a disadvantage in any category. Phoenix couldn't provide message-level restore on an on-premise Exchange server but after we moved to the cloud that requirement went away.

Incentivized

VMware is software and typically hardware agnostic, this does require extra design and consideration versus putting in backup appliances. Some other solutions are a software as well and can be layered on top of vSphere to enhance existing environments. We need to weigh the benefits of licensing versus software costs and the management cost of having multiple tools.

Incentivized

• This is a necessary service to keep your information safe. I would not say that there is a tangible ROI unless you reach a point where your server gets attacked and wiped-out. Then, you can recover your information in an easy manner, which could represent a potential several-thousand-dollar savings.

Incentivized

• Requires running vSphere at target DR sites
• Potential licensing cost for cold/standby locations

Incentivized