I had a short call yesterday with my friend W. Curtis Preston, a Tech Field Day alumn turned Chief Technical Architect at Druva, to get an update about their latest whereabouts. It turns out that yesterday Druva unveiled on 5-Jun-18 the acquisition of Ireland-based company CloudRanger, a data solution protection focused on AWS (Amazon Web Services).
What is CloudRanger?
I had never heard of CloudRanger before this call, and it seems that even Druva is aware of this, as their main page at druva.com currently has a “What is Cloudranger” section. The closest name similarity I could come to is Quest’s vRanger, which is totally unrelated.
It turns out that CloudRanger is an Ireland-based company which was founded in 2016 and already has a nifty customer base in its short lifespan (300+ customers). The company has seen tremendous growth (threefold over the last 6 months) and reports their biggest client is generating above 4000 snapshots per day.
A brief look at the technology behind CloudRanger
CloudRanger focus is clearly on AWS: the service supports Amazon EC2, EBS, RDS and RedShift among others, and has been built (obviously) natively for the cloud, so there’s no carry-over from legacy technologies. API use is at the core of the product, which helps manage AWS IAM for granular access management, as well as multi-account support, in an any-to-any relationship topology (one CloudRanger account can be use for multiple AWS accounts, or the opposite).
The solution provides an agentless backup service that leverages AWS APIs including Windows VSS snapshot quiescing for Windows-based EC2 instances, which allows CloudRanger to take consistent backups even without the presence of a software agent. Customers will certainly appreciate the ability to perform cross-AWS region backups, File-Level Recovery, and other perks such as Automated Disaster Recovery Testing.
The service is a pure Pay-as-you-go SaaS offering with no hardware investments. I haven’t been exposed to the pricing of the solution (the charging mechanics) but the pricing is available here and seems to be based on a “per server” basis. As usual, if you are interested in their offering (and I’m not getting paid nor getting any money from this) you should do your due diligence and ask questions.
Max’s Opinion
The CloudRanger acquisition complements Druva’s DMaaS (Data Management as a Service) and is a very rational decision. Instead of taking the route of internal development (Apollo), Druva set to acquire a company with pre-existing know-how and a very decent customer base (considering the company was founded in 2016), which makes sense from a strategical perspective. Hopefully the remaining funds that were initially allotted for Apollo development can be (at least partially) diverted to other R&D activities, depending of course on the acquisition price – but again, CloudRanger business seems to be thriving so that’s another plus for Druva.
The next step will be indeed the integration of CloudRanger technology into Druva’s own DMaaS platform. For now, it’s going to be business as usual both for Druva and CloudRanger customers. Let’s see how it works out for Druva / CloudRanger and let’s wish them a lot of success with the acquisition, integration and portfolio expansion.
There’s also a Press Release that might be of interest.