By Jaspreet
on April 29th, 2009
under About Druvaa, Case Studies, Druvaa inSync, Technology & Innovation
As I mentioned in the last post, Druvaa acquired some great customers across 12 different countries. A large majority of the new customers are large enterprises from Technology and Finance verticals. The smallest deal size was about 20 licenses and largest about 10,000 licenses.
As a company policy we don’t engage in traditional enterprise selling, instead just help the interested customers buy mainly through the website. With this model, its even more important for to know what the customer likes and dislikes about the product.
I tried to reach almost all major customers to see why they purchased inSync and some others on why they did not. In this post I have tried to summarize the response I received.
Six things the customers really love about the product -
- Usability and ease of use - Especially the quick 20 minutes setup time for inSync v3 was very much appreciated
- Data deduplication and time savings - On an average the customers are seeing 1:15 storage and bandwidth savings compared to traditional softwares.
- WAN performance - Most of the customers are backing up mobile workforce easily and enjoying this feature.
- Search based restore - Search is used by almost 100% of the users and absolutely loved by all. This is something truly unique with inSync.
- Granular user policy control - Control over bandwidth, folders and restore policies is appreciated by all.
- Invisible backups - Smaller, smarter backup and specially the flexible scheduling is liked by all.
One of the fast emerging hot favorite feature is Bare Metal Restore, but I believe it may take some more time for this feature to get adopted properly.
Three things the customers or prospects would like to see improve -
- Mac Client - We do have Linux and Windows client, and all I can say is that Mac client is on its way
- Price - In the current economic scenario, unfortunately pricing is a major issue. This is probably a reason we saw sharp rise in sales when we offered the online introductory discount on v3. We do plan to release a low cost offering for inSync in near future
- Performance for large backup/restore- With the new release there are a few performance issues for non-compressible data especially over the Gigabit network. This is expected to be taken care of with next release.
With the new v3 release now production ready, in the next few posts I would like to outline the product roadmap and whats happening with the new product - Druvaa Pheonix.
By Jaspreet
on April 15th, 2009
under Events & Conferences
Yup, there has been no new posts over the past one month. March is financial year ending for us and kept all of us very busy.
Overall it was a good year for us. The economic slowdown actually brings new opportunities for small company like ours. Where most of our big competitors have deferred new products, scrapped new initiatives and reduces sales force - Druvaa demonstrated almost 300% QYQ growth rate
Last quarter we released a new major upgrade (v3), launched new website , acquired some great new customers and established some fabulous case studies & benchmarks.
In the next few posts, I would like to highlight some of these wins and how the road ahead looks like.
By Press
on March 11th, 2009
under Druvaa inSync
March 11, 2009
Within 2 weeks of announcing the beta, Druvaa announced the general availability of long awaited inSync enterprise laptop backup v3 on Windows platform. The new release adds features like search, bare-metal restore and performance improvements.
Druvaa is one of the fastest growing enterprises in storage and data backup domain. The flagship product Druvaa inSync is fully automated laptop backup software which protects corporate data for office and remote users. It features simple backup, point-in-time restores, and patent-pending deduplication technology to make backups much faster.
The new v3 release includes the following features -
- Full PC Backup (with data deduplication)
- Bare Metal Restore
- Search functionality in restore
- Performance improvements for large files (e.g. Outlook PST)
- Usability Improvements
Find out more about new release - http://www.druvaa.com/insync/laptop-backup
Download a Free 30 days evaluation copy - http://www.druvaa.com/download/insync/
Over 80% of corporate data is duplicated across users. Druvaa inSync uses data deduplication to save “only a single copy” of content (emails/docs) duplicated across users. This delivers 10X faster backup with 90% reduction in bandwidth and storage.
The product uses Continuous Data Protection to create near-infinite restore points. On restore the user sees a timeline view of data and can restore from any point in the past.
Key Product highlights includes -
- Data Deduplication - Saves 90% backup time, bandwidth and storage.
- Continuous Data Protection - Timeline based, from the past restore
- Backup for Remote Users - WAN Optimized, faster backups over VPN/WAN
- Security - 256 bit SSL and 256 bit AES encryption
- On-demand Restore - GUI and browser based restores from any point in the past
- Advanced Reporting - Six different reporting options for flexible & detailed reporting
Product Page - http://www.druvaa.com/insync/laptop-backup
Save 25% on new Purchase until March 31st 2009
Druvaa also announced an introductory 25% discount on the purchase of new v3 release. To find out more about the pricing and new discount, please visit - http://www.druvaa.com/insync/buy
About Druvaa
Founded in 2007, Druvaa Software is a leading provider of Continuous Data Protection and Disaster Recovery solutions. Since inception Druvaa has released two award wining products products - Druvaa inSync and Druvaa Phoenix. Druvaa is privately held and backed by Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Accord International (HK).
Corporate Website - http://www.druvaa.com/
By Milind
on March 7th, 2009
under Druvaa inSync
As inSync 3.0 release nears completion and the action moves from development to release engineering, I get some time to reflect on how inSync has shaped up.
(Please let us know if you have any feedback for beta.)
Some factors proved very crucial in the development process -
Usability First
inSync team always kept usability ahead of everything else. Usability ensured that inSync features can be easily evaluated by prospective customers. A customer may or may not like a product, but that comes after she can evaluate it easily. No usability means no evaluations means no feedback and no sale. We would rather not have a feature than an unusable one.
Zero Baggage
inSync started as a disk-to-disk backup. It does not have any baggage that carries with a tape backup with disk-to-disk backup feature. We also tried not to pick non-core features along the way. If inSync picks up a new feature, be assured that Druvaa is very serious about it. We would rather have a small set of well deveoped features than a plathora of half cooked ones.
Release Early, Release Often (RERO)- The Apple Philosophy
inSync 1.0 was a small feature set, but a complete product. (Interestingly, a set of customers found that it meets all their requirements and continue to use it even today.) Note that RERO is not about the quality or usability of the product. It’s only about leaner releases, each with a small set of new features. RERO allowed us a rich customer feedback that helped us pick the next set of feature to focus on.
I’m not saying that we do not miss deadlines, but things are more predictable while dealing with a small set of features. RERO also implies seamless upgrades, which is an extra effort but much lesser than managing a big release. In essence, we would rather have a small release than a big one that never ships.
Team with Diverse Experience
Druvaa development team has engineers with extensive experience working on Windows, Linux, systems programming, database programming, UI programming, QA development, you name it. Things would be different if all of us were brilliant system programmers but none knew how to do UI, or the other way round. I’m proud to say that inSync is a no handicap team and we strive to ensure that the product does not have any weak areas.
Python as The Programming Language
Kudos to Guido for a wonderfully intuitive language and kudos to the python team for the extensive set of modules. inSync uses C/C++ when it comes to heavy computation or interfacing with the operating system. But in both the cases, we managed to keep the C/C++ code to lower level functions. The high level logic is coded completely in python. It allowed us very fast developement of good quality, highly maintainable, cross platform code.
Don’t Reinvent, Reuse The Wheel
inSync uses Qt (PyQt) for GUI, PostgreSQL as database server and several other python modules. We picked these after extensive experimentation and analysis. We also contribute back any bug fixes and enhancements. It’s not about just reusing the wheel but choosing a good wheel and then making it better.
Please let us know if you have any feedback for the beta. Would be more than glad to take a look.
By Jaspreet
on February 26th, 2009
under Druvaa inSync, Technology & Innovation
Not sure if you have noticed, we have made significant changes to the website. It’s a complete redesign with primary focus on usability. I have requested George to write a post about it.
We also released the new
v3 beta. The new beta (just like the website) has lot more colors, style, wizards and a whole bunch of usability enhancements. Take a look at the screenshots -
By Press
on February 26th, 2009
under Disaster Recovery, Druvaa inSync, Events & Conferences, News & Events
February 26, 2009
Druvaa announced the general availability of long awaited inSync enterprise laptop backup v3 beta on Windows platform. The beta release adds features like search, bare-metal restore and performance improvements.
Druvaa is one of the fastest growing startup in enterprise storage and backup domain. The flagship product Druvaa inSync is fully automated laptop backup software which protects corporate data for office and remote users. It features simple backup, point-in-time restores, and patent-pending deduplication technology to make backups much faster.
The new beta includes the following features -
- Full PC Backup (with data deduplication)
- Bare Metal Restore
- Search functionality in restore
- Performance improvements for large files (e.g. Outlook PST)
- Usability Improvements
Find our more about beta and download a free copy from - http://www.druvaa.com/insync/beta
Over 80% of corporate data is duplicated across users. Druvaa inSync uses data deduplication to save “only a single copy” of content (emails/docs) duplicated across users. This delivers 10X faster backup with 90% reduction in bandwidth and storage.
The product uses Continuous Data Protection to create near-infinite restore points. On restore the user sees a timeline view of data and can restore from any point in the past.
Key Product highlights includes -
- Data Deduplication - Saves 90% backup time, bandwidth and storage.
- Continuous Data Protection - Timeline based, from the past restore
- Backup for Remote Users - WAN Optimization for faster backups for remote users over WAN/VPN
- Security - 256 bit SSL and 256 bit AES encryption
- On-demand Restore - GUI and browser based restores from any point in the past
- Advanced Reporting - Six different reporting options for flexible and detailed reporting
Product Page - http://www.druvaa.com/insync/laptop-backup
About Druvaa
Founded in 2007, Druvaa Software is a leading provider of Continuous Data Protection and Disaster Recovery solutions. Since inception Druvaa has released two award wining products products - Druvaa inSync and Druvaa Phoenix. Druvaa is privately held and backed by Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Accord International (HK).
Corporate Website - http://www.druvaa.com/
By Carlos
on February 22nd, 2009
under Productization, Technology & Innovation
By now, all good designers and developers realize the importance of usability for their work. Usable products offer great user experiences, and great user experiences lead to happy customers.
Six common mistakes and recommendations for product design and usability -
1. Usability Vs Utility
Utility refers to the ability of the product to perform tasks. The more tasks the product is designed to perform, the more utility it has. Usability refers to the ease of learning and performing these tasks.
Most software give higher priority to features than usability. As a result it becomes more and more confusing for the end user to get work done.
2. Liking it Vs Using It
Likeability is always a desirable trait in a product. If people like the product, they are more likely to use it and to recommend it to others. But as with utility, likeability is often confused with usability.
People often like a product for reasons unrelated to utility and usability. They may be attracted to its styling and flash, or to the status they believe the product confers upon them. People tend to like highly usable products, but you should not assume that means a well-liked product is usable.
3. Discovery Vs Flow
Some of the most widely used products do not have an instructions manual e.g. toothbrush or Skype.
Products with “Installation Manuals” turn me off. IMO, there is place on earth for installation manuals. And admin guides should be only when you want to learn a little extra or troubleshoot. Instead the product should try and use inline or in-GUI help as much as possible.
Discovery involves looking for, and finding, a product’s feature in response to a particular need. And it gets worse when a complex feature needs multiple inputs or choices to be made.
I am a big fan of wizards. I think the task becomes much simpler when broken down into series of actions.
4. Tiny Meaningless buttons
The buttons should signify action. The most common mistake with buttons is when they are labeled “OK” which in my opinion makes very little sense.
Buttons should have lables which signify clear actions like - “Modify Report Schedule”
5. Duplicate Actions
Quite often, products have more than one ways of performing the same task. This is confusing and often irritating. There should always be one clear way of performing an action.
6. Don’t Give Too Many Choices
Never confuse flexibility with giving too many choice. You would never buy car from a salesman who gives you 8-10 names for “the cars that might suit you”. Instead you are more likely to buy, when the salesman gives you 1 (or max 2) options and convinces you.
If you are sure that more than 80% of your audience is likely to vote “yes” for the option, please make it a default. Or if you really want it, add it to “advanced”.
Disclosure
If you think inSync is a very user friendly product, you would be pleasently surprised with the upcoming upgrade. Usability has been one of our core focus areas in inSync v3 release.
By Carlos
on February 11th, 2009
under Data Protection, Disaster Recovery, Technology & Innovation
We all pay our monthly electricity bills. I am sure no one wants to own a power plant But, on the contrary most of us own cars and very few rent it for daily use.
The two most important factors which decide how we want to use these two services are -
- The cost of ownership
- The cost and effort in maintenance
Cloud computing today promises benefits (which are similar to using electricity) for computing, hosted application and storage. Although the offer is very lucrative, but their is a dark side to this as well.
The post just tries to some aspects which you must keep in mind before making the plunge.
The Dark Side of the Cloud
Application Integration
Most of the services like SimpleDB, EBS, SQS still needs a lot of application integration and porting. And that’s something enterprises hate. It’s one of the primary reasons the X86 architecture and IPV4 are so widely used. Even if someone ports the application to these services, he is guaranteed to be locked with it for the rest of his life
Services like salesforce.com don’t need any porting, but there have been cases of access to data being refused customers who wish to change the vendor.
Uptime and QoS Guarantees
Most of these services including Amazon and Salesforce do not give uptime and QoS guarantees. The billing and EULA are free from any such clauses.
And when there is a downtime, you can’t do much than start calling the support center to play the blame-game. And its funny when see the the cloud provider talking the same language to its service provider
It’s No Way Even Close to Perfect
Take a recent unfortunate situation for Ylastic, a company that provides a single front-end to manage Amazon Web Services, who was recently an unwillingly participant in one of these cloud bursts. Ylastic noticed something strange occurring with one of the Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) Elastic Block Stores (EBS).
But something wasn’t quite right. And over the course of a few hours the story played out via Twitter as Ylastic noticed issues with its EBS instances. When the problem was finally identified, Ylastic discovered that the data could not be recovered. They were forced to recover from an earlier snapshot, that contained only a subset of the data.
Finally, after recovering what data they could, Ylastic had to go to its customers with the unfortunate message:
“AWS has finally terminated the frozen instances. But the EBS volume is still detaching and has been for hours. It doesn’t seem like we will be able to get into it at this point. Some time in the last month or so, our EBS snapshotting of this stuck volume seems to have stopped working correctly…. We have gone back and run through all the snapshots, and the last good snapshot that we have is from October 1.”
Who was at fault? Amazon? Ylastic? Truly, no one. It was simply a combination of issues. A perfect storm in the cloud, as it were. And that perfect storm resulted in data loss for Ylastic and its customer base.
Control
Take for example the case when you take up a cheap hosted website plan on a shared server. You can still negotiate uptime and QoS guarantees. But, what you just can’t control is a SPAM King sharing the same server and IP address with you
Most likely you will face two problems -
- A slow response on the website- the SPAM King has taken up the computing
- Public mail servers will mark the mail traffic from you as spam
Plus, there been many stories around salesforce (read this and this) and twitter getting hacked.
ROI
Cost of ownership for a power plant is so damn high, that you just can’t afford one even if you are not happy with your power company. That exactly has to be the case for the cloud. No one would think of hosting his own solution when the cloud offers the same peanuts.
By Jaspreet
on January 25th, 2009
under Data Protection, Technology & Innovation
This topic has been on my plate for some time now. It’s interesting to see how databases have come a long way and have clearly out-shadowed file-systems for storing structured or unstructured information.
Technically, both of them support the basic features necessary for data access. For example both of them ensure -
- Data is managed to ensure its integrity and quality
- Allow shared access by a community of users
- Use of well defined schema for data-access
- Support a query language
But, file-systems seriously lack some of the critical features necessary for managing data. Lets take a look at some of these feature.
Transaction support
Atomic transactions guarantee complete failure or success of an operation. This is especially needed when there is concurrent access to same data-set. This is one of the basic features provided by all databases.
But, most file-systems don’t have this features. Only the lesser known file-systems - Transactional NTFS(TxF), Sun ZFS, Veritas VxFS support this feature. Most of the popular opensource file-systems (including ext3, xfs, reiserfs) are not even POSIX compliant.
Fast Indexing
Databases allow indexing based on any attribute or data-property (i.e. SQL columns). This helps fast retrieval of data, based on the indexed attribute. This functionality is not offered by most file-systems i.e. you can’t quickly access “all files created after 2PM today”.
The desktop search tools like Google desktop or MAC spotlight offer this functionality. But for this, they have to scan and index the complete file-system and store the information in a internal relational-database.
Snapshots
Snapshot is a point-in-time copy/view of the data. Snapshots are needed for backup applications, which need consistent point-in-time copies of data.
The transactional and journaling capabilities enable most of the databases to offer snapshots without shopping access to the data. Most file-systems however, don’t provide this feature (ZFS and VxFS being only exceptions). The backup softwares have to either depend on running application or underlying storage for snapshots.
Clustering
Advanced databases like Oracle (and now MySQL) also offer clustering capabilities. The “g” in “Oracle 11g” actually stands for “grid” or clustering capability. MySQL offers shared-nothing clusters using synchronous replication. This helps the databases scale up and support larger & more-fault tolerant production environments.
File systems still don’t support this option :( The only exceptions are Veritas CFS and GFS (Open Source).
Replication
Replication is commodity with databases and form the basis for disaster-recovery plans. File-systems still have to evolve to handle it.
Relational View of Data
File systems store files and other objects only as a stream of bytes, and have little or no information about the data stored in the files. Such file systems also provide only a single way of organizing the files, namely via directories and file names. The associated attributes are also limited in number e.g. - type, size, author, creation time etc. This does not help in managing related data, as disparate items do not have any relationships defined.
Databases on the other hand offer easy means to relate stored data. It also offers a flexible query language (SQL) to retrieve the data. For example, it is possible to query a database for “contacts of all persons who live in Acapulco and sent emails yesterday”, but impossible in case of a file system.
File-systems need to evolve and provide capabilities to relate different data-sets. This will help the application writers to make use of native file-system capabilities to relate data. A good effort in this direction was Microsoft WinFS.
Conclusion
The only disadvantage with using the databases as primary storage option, seems to be the additional cost associated. But, I see no reason why file-systems in future will borrow features from databases.
Disclosure
Druvaa inSync uses a proprietary file-system to store and index the backed up data. The meta-data for the file-system is stored in an embedded PostgreSQL database. The database driven model was chosen to store additional identifiers withe each block - size, hash and time. This helps the filesystem to -
- Divide files into variable sized blocks
- Data deduplication - Store single copy of duplicate blocks
- Temporal File-system - Store time information with each block. This enables faster time-based restores.
By Carlos
on January 19th, 2009
under Data Protection, Disaster Recovery
The recent Journalspace data loss episode, is a good lesson for all of us. I don’t know what exactly went wrong, but it highlights the fact that real businesses today can’t depend upon only tape/disk based archival of business critical data.
IMO, a good data protection strategy should value following points -
- Clear understanding of RPO and RTO for data protection
- Local disk-based backup for faster recovery.
- Remote-Replication for disaster recovery
- Archival and e-discovery
In simple terms RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is - “up to what point in time the data can be recovered” and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) implies - “how much time would it take to recover data”. These goals differ from business to business. But, any real enterprise can’t depend on slow tapes for this, especially when it comes to critical customer data.
The two terms - “Backup” & “Archival” are often confused with each other. And as I see it going forward, more and more enterprises would use local disk based backup-recovery for lowering RPO & RTO. The Tape/VTL/Tape would only be used for archival of older and currently-not-being-used data for compliance or specific business reasons.
With remote IP-based replication almost becoming commodity now, it can easily be used to avoid any local disasters. But, it would be interesting to see it being integrated with local disk-based backup systems. This could reduce load on the production server and make recovery simple.
On the good side, I loved the CouchSurfing 2.0 Rised from the Ashes story covered by Luxman. The company lost the entire MySQL database almost two years back because of a faulty file-system. Founder & CEO Casey Fenton announced company’s death. Later, Fenton’s email was met with vocal opposition to the termination of the project and considerable support for its recreation.
“CouchSurfing 2.0″ was announced early in July 2006, with the intent to be operational within 10 days. The initial implementation of CouchSurfing 2.0 actually launched after only four days.
Previous Posts
