The phrase “eat your own dog food” or the more palatable “drink your own champagne” gets bandied about a lot in Silicon Valley. (I swear I’ve heard it almost as much as “win-win” and “pure play”). I’ve worked at a number of companies where we’ve said this, and done it, with varying degrees of success. No matter the level of success, it’s an important process, since it forces your company to be more customer focused.
At Druva, we walk a mile in our customers shoes, and every employee uses inSync for laptop backup. Prior to any release, we go through the upgrade or installation process ourselves. What this allows us to do is feel any pain first, and make any adjustments as necessary to avoid transferring that pain to the customers. By using the product on a daily basis, we can put it through it’s paces and watch it for performance, scalability, ease of use and so on. It’s been fun and we’ve learned a lot, not only for laptop backup, but also using the iPad and iPhone interface. It also allows anyone within the company to make suggestions about the products as they use them, which is key to our ideas on innovation as we saw in our inaugural Druva Hack Day. We’ve had lots of great ideas from all of our employees, and our product roadmap is pretty exciting.
I actually had to recover a presentation I was working on that I lost recently. I felt the cold panic, the “Oh No!” moment (ok, I didn’t say “No”, I said something else, that rhymed with “truck”, but keeping this blog at a PG-13 rating is important). I recovered the file easily using inSync. It just worked. Very often in Marketing, we will tout certain features and throw out statistics on product performance, but the one thing I realized in using inSync is that, when we say it’s the most simplified laptop backup solution out there, it’s true. And it is lightning fast. It’s a good feeling to be able to stand behind your product like this, and we also hope that customers know that we’re in the trenches, eating dog food or drinking champagne with them.
We did a webinar with Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup Blog) yesterday and the response was overwhelming. It’s good to see more and more companies focusing on laptop backup. Below are the slides for reference.
When we started the journey about 3 years ago, we were almost the only startup focused on Enterprise Laptop Backup and the only case study for us to follow was that of Connected (which was acquired by Iron Mountain and then eventually left to die). We have come a long way and have 600+ strong customers with some great names like PWC, NASA, Xerox, Schlumberger etc. When you have a fire at your home, all you care is a good/reliable fire extinguisher and value the brand less, and I believe that’s what happened with us with all these great brands.
And now its good to see many other players joining the game. Last week we saw announcements by i365 Cloud (Seagate) and CommVault. Mozy and Carbonite have also done a good job in educating the consumer markets which is eventually spreading awareness in businesses as well.
With the February launch of Druva inSyne Enterprise and last week’s Backup Cloud announcement, we have yet again established our leadership in innovation.
Our salesforce stats reveal that about 63% of qualified leads eventually buy InSync and we almost never lose to our competitors (we lost just 8 against 320 opportunities in last 1 year). We’re super confident of improving this track record with upcoming customer reach programs and product announcements. Stay tuned.
How do you unleash innovation in an organization with rich talent? Especially when engineers have many ideas and features that they are really passionate about but cannot find time to work on them because there are always more urgent and immediate things on any single day?
Enter a Hack Day event. The Hack Day event provides the perfect opportunity for passionate employees to block times on their calendars, bring their favorite idea to the forefront, form teams with like-minded employees within the organization, and just hack away. I’ve seen this concept work like magic in companies like Yahoo and Intuit. Today, we’re having our first Hack Day event at Druva!
A Hack Day Event
The Druva Hack Day, a 24-hour code marathon, began today at 9AM. The participation from engineers and QA has been almost at a 100%, which is amazing! We have 19 teams (1-3 people) working on their passionate ideas as we speak. We also have our fearless leader, Jaspreet, hacking his favorite idea. Common sights as you walk along the offices are huddles, whiteboard discussions, intense coding, and camaraderie, all of which one would expect to find in a successful hack day event.
We have the final presentations scheduled tomorrow morning at the end of the 24-hour event, so everyone can share their latest and greatest creations with the rest. Exciting awards await the winners, whose works will be judged based on their creativity, technical difficulty, and most of all, the impact in the market and on our customers. Can’t wait to see what the teams have in store!
Every well-planned release has a motif, a term often used to describe a dominant theme in a literary, artistic, or musical work.
In all the early releases, the motif for Druva has been Simplicity: simplicity for both end-users and for IT administrators. For end users, Druva inSync is now so simple to use that it just works without their knowing. It’s completely non-intrusive and works on all kinds of networks such as WAN and VPN. It’s so simple to use that end users can access their data from any Web browser without having to contact IT. Likewise, for IT administrators, it’s so simple to download (~40MB), install (under 20 minutes), and manage (almost zero maintenance) that the total cost of ownership is almost negligible. The simplicity motif has been a strong differentiator for Druva’s offerings.
For inSync 4.0, we made Storage and Bandwidth Optimization the motif. To optimize storage, we introduced App-aware Dedupe, an industry-first dedupe technology that offers a 90% storage savings across all user data and a 100% dedupe accuracy at the source (laptops) for supported applications such as Outlook and Office. To optimize bandwidth, we introduced the Octopus WAN optimization engine, a multi-threaded client architecture that does smart bandwidth throttling to offer a 5x performance gain for every client backing up on WAN.
The eye-catching red shack on the wharf (Rockport, Massachusetts) is often called Motif #1, a reference to its popularity among artists.
The theme for inSync 4.1 emerged naturally to “Scale” as customers were increasingly deploying Druva to more users in each of their environments. With release 4.1, we wanted to make inSync scale efficiently along several dimensions as outlined below –
Scale -
- 2000 users per server
- 16TB of data per server
- 200 parallel connections per server
Performance -
- We’re excited to introduce an innovative HyperCache technology, which can improve backup performance by 6x compared to inSync 4.0. HyperCache is an in-memory cache that can be configured to access the most optimal subset of your dedupe index in memory resulting in a high hit rate. The usual 80-20 rule applies here: with just a 30% subset of the dedupe index, Hypercache can deliver upwards of 75% hit rate. We recommend a 4GB of HyperCache size for every 1TB of data to maximize performance. The admin console offers a simple way for you to configure HyperCache for optimal performance.
- You can now configure an SSD storage for your dedupe index to further enhance your server performance. Lab results show a whopping 12x performance improvement with HyperCache and SSD configurations.
- You can now install Druva on a 64-bit system for enhanced performance.
Administration –
- 4.1 now supports a new administrative role in addition to a Server Administrator. A Profile Administrator role grants permissions to manage one or more user profiles in order to edit profile settings, add users, and manage data restore for those profiles. This is a great way to scale the administration tasks across your organization between server and profile administration.
- In light of the above role, we’ve enhanced our dashboard and reporting, so an administrator can get a customized view of their reports depending on their role.
- You can now automate the import of users to inSync from your Active Directory. A periodic import from your AD can be set up to dynamically add users to inSync.
Access -
We’re excited about the upcoming deployments of inSync 4.1 and the performance benefits to all of you. In my next blog, I’ll talk about the 2 editions of inSync 4.1 (Enterprise and Professional), how they compare, and which one is right for you. Stay tuned….
We recently had the chance to present to a group of bloggers and writers at Tech Field Day, an industry event organized by the fine folks over at Gestalt IT (big shout out to Stephen Foskett & crew). It was a great event, and by all accounts everyone seemed receptive to our story, despite the fact that we were last up on a day of presentations. One writer, Tom Hollingsworth, was first to write about what he learned from Tech Field Day, and also wrote a nice article on Druva, comparing us to a calf.
Yes, I said calf, or rather, Tom did.
But this is the great thing about bloggers and writers, and presenting to your peers. They look at things differently, offer different opinions and insights. And to Tom, the rise that Druva has had, amassing over 600 customers globally in 3 short years, was nothing short of miraculous, reminding him of how a calf can stand on it’s own a few short hours after being born. I’d never really thought of it that way, but after reading it, felt it was a fitting comparison. It means we must be addressing an important problem, and the way we’re addressing it, is in the right way.
Of course, to piggy back off of this, the question now is, can Druva grow from a calf to a bull. We’d like to think so, – the recent press coverage we’ve received on our launch was pretty compelling, picked up by InfoStor, StorageNewsletter.com and NetworkWorld among others. In an article on Network Computing Howard Marks said:
“I am constantly amazed at how frequently organizations leave the data on those laptops essentially unprotected. By taking a unique application aware approach to data deduplication, Druva’s Insync may be the best solution to date to this seemingly intractable problem”
Bullish words indeed…
I have a confession. I admit I’m a former Windows user turned Mac Geek (no, I don’t have a black turtleneck, you have to draw the line somewhere). Of course, being an avid Mac user I spend a lot of time on my iPad, checking email, reading blogs, reviewing documents, checking designs, surfing the web, downloading apps etc.
Seems like I continuously have my head in my iPhone these days too, mostly for work (though I have been known to play the odd game or three of Fruit Ninja – highest score so far is 645).
Up to now, if I ever needed a file urgently, say a PowerPoint deck or a PDF, I would either pull that from my laptop, or have to dig it out of email.
With the recent release of inSync 4.1 support for iPhone & iPad, now all of the files that are on my laptop I can access via backups on my iPhone or iPad using the inSync remote client.
The inSync client installs just like any other app. Once installed it’s very easy to use, you configure it to point to your inSync server, add your username and password and voila, you now have access to all of your backed up data over time. Simple.
The 4.1 release of inSync Enterprise also included some important and exciting additions, such as HyperCache, multi-admin support, and Active Directory integration, making it extremely easy to import and maintain users. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, already we have plans for additional development to add more functionality and extend our protection beyond the laptop to iPads, iPhones and more. Exciting times ahead…
It’s not often that a new release announcement comes on Valentines day, I am super excited to announce the new inSync v4.1 Enterprise release. It brings some great new features and scalability improvements, and yet again demonstrates our razor-sharp focus on end-point devices.
Druva announced and demonstrated the new release recently at the Tech Field Day event at San Jose and got a fantastic response.
New features and improvements include -
- App for iPhone/iPad for 1-click data access
- HyperCache: new in-memory dedupe subsystem to boost backup performance by 3X
- Support for solid state disks (SSD) to boost performance and scalability
- Multi-admin support with profile-level quotas
- Better AD integration
The new release, pricing structure and upgrade details should hit the website by Feb 21st.
The engineering team has spent more than 12 hours/day for last 5 months, and I am sure you would appreciate the hard work. The next few posts will discuss this release and each of these features in detail. Stay tuned!
This weekend I came across an incredible report – “The Billion Dollar Lost Laptop Problem” (PDF), published by Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Intel. The report highlighted the (true) fact that enterprises are losing billions of dollars from lost laptops.
The report surveyed 329 enterprises to find that they had lost 86,455 laptops in past one year. Using another report “Cost of a Lost Laptop” (PDF), they quantified the total loss for the surveyed enterprise to be $2.2 Billion.
Here is the quick math from both these reports –
- On an avg. 9.44% of corporate laptops are lost/damaged every year
- Education and health care face the highest risk of about 10.5%
- 76% of these laptops are lost off-site or during transit
- 46% of laptops contain confidential data
- Combining the loss of business, confidential data, time and hardware the avg. cost of lost laptop is $25,000
- Backup and encryption can significantly reduce the cost (by approx. 40%)
I would be on my way to India this Tuesday evening. Will make sure my data is backed up and I don’t take it out at Starbucks 
The inSync client for Mac (OS X) is finally here !
This was definitely the most requested feature and most eagerly awaited.
Although I agree that we did take much more time than initially promised, but this definitely was a much shorter wait compared to getting Beatles on the iTunes store (and I am really hoping that they do announce it tomorrow, Nov 16th)
The client for Mac is part of the new v4.0.1 release (release notes). The Mac version incorporates all the key features available in the Windows version including the app-aware data deduplication, WAN Optimization and search.
The new v4.0.1 release, also offers a 10% performance improvement for incremental backups over inSync v4.0. The inSync server is now equipped with a VSS writer, making it simpler for any VSS-aware backup software to backup inSync server.
Download the new release here – http://www.druva.com/download/insync
As Silver+ sponsors, we’ll be making our presence felt at Booth no. 56. Save the dates, register free* now!
The SNW Europe ‘Power of 3’ event is a high-value educational conference program addressing everything from the latest in data protection and business continuity, through desktop, server and storage virtualization to the cutting edge of cloud services. It comprises three events, spread across two days, held under one roof, at the Congress Frankfurt, Germany.
SNW Europe has co-located with Datacenter Technologies and Virtualization World to bring forth the event.
Click here for free* online registration. Our promotion code is S6210.
*Registration will cover entrance to all 3 events. Promocode is only valid until 25th October – any on the door registrations will be charged at full price.
The event also offers attendees:
- NIA Europe Storage User Roundtable - interactive session where a select group of storage end users can learn from and share experiences with their peers about the latest trends in storage technologies
- Elevator Pitch - vote for the best sponsor pitch and win free badges and accommodation for 2 people in 2011
- Sales-pitch free zones – A revised the agenda so that time in the conference sessions is spent learning and understanding, and wherever possible, avoiding the dreaded ‘sales-pitch’.
For more details on the event and schedules, click here.
See you there!
