Review of Druva Phoenix as a DRaaS solution
August 24, 2020

Review of Druva Phoenix as a DRaaS solution

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Druva Phoenix

Druva Phoenix is a tool which aims to simplify backup and recovery. Essentially a DRaaS service running on the cloud, this improves ROI by reducing the costs associated with a cold DR on premise site. With cloud scale, there is also no need to worry about right sizing your backup infrastructure as it is all taken care of in the cloud.

Currently we are using it to back up virtual machines in a VMware environment. Primarily the role of Phoenix within the institution is a DRaaS solution which allows us to quickly get the service up and running should there be an outage within the institute, e.g. DC power failure, network disconnection.
  • DRaaS.
  • Backup and Restore to on-premise hardware.
  • Deduplication.
  • Better client support especially in the DRaaS functionality.
  • Improving ease of use with AWS.
  • Support for other public cloud.
  • Time reduction from sysadmin daily ops.
  • Removal of need of cold standby site.
  • Deduplication leads to reduced storage costs.
Phoenix is a good solution to explore for DRaaS. The deduplication capability and the ability to backup not just VM but also databases allows for a more fine-grained restore including file or table level.

However as Phoenix can only restore the VMs to AWS, you will not be able to use its full functionality if AWS is not your main cloud provider. Even with AWS you will need to involve your Cloud Solution Architect to assist with the design of the network environment to ensure the DRaaS works as expected.
Druva support is capable of supporting Phoenix as a tool within their platform, and they are quick to address any bugs that may appear as part of normal day to day operations.

Where they may not perform so well is the integration to AWS, even though they mentioned that they are natively integrated, each customer still needs to get hands on in designing their DR environment because Phoenix stops at VM restoration.
Other than Phoenix, there is AWS Cloud Endure and Azure Backup and Recovery.

Both tools work well to back up and restore the on-premise VM to the respective cloud, but stop short at the deduplication capabilities.

Additionally a certain level of expertise and on-premise infrastructure is required in order to deploy either tool on premise.
DRaaS, tape backup replacements are common use cases for Phoenix.

Do bear in mind that as this is a SaaS, there is a need to right size the internet bandwidth from your DC to Phoenix. The more workloads and the larger the workloads, especially in environment with large amount of changes daily > leads to higher traffic to cloud, thus proper planning of your backup window and internet bandwidth is a key consideration.

Druva Phoenix (UNPUBLISHED) Feature Ratings

Incremental backup identification
6
Backup to the cloud
6
Deduplication and file compression
7
Management dashboard
7
Retention options
7
Encryption
7