Nasscom showcases emerging product companies at Product Conclave 2008.

Chaired by Dr Ganesh Natarajan, this session was a showcase of three of India’s emerging Software Product companies. Dr. Natarajan started by sharing his excitement on the NASSCOM’s Emerge Forum. He then briefly introduced the companies.

OrangeScape: OrangeScape is the creator of DimensionN, business application development platform for non-programmers. It is one of NASSCOM’s Top 100 Innovative Companies. <snip> …

iViz Technologies: Started at IIT Kharagpur and based out of Kolkatta, iViz Technologies is an IDG funded venture. IT offers world’s only end-to-end On Demand Automated Penetration Testing service on a SaaS based model. <snip> …

Druvaa Software: A startup in the area of Storage Solutions, Druvaa Software is also the winner of the recent TiE-Canaan Entrepreneurship Challenge. Based out of Pune, Druvaa is an Indian Angel Network funded company.

Jaspreet Singh, one of the founders presented their technology. Druvaa has developed a product that provides continuous data ­back-up. It’s targeted at medium-sized firms in sectors that rely heavily on data accuracy, such as financial services. Druvaa inSync v2.1 offers upto 10 times faster enterprise Notebook backup compared to traditional methods with 90% reduction in bandwidth and storage utilization.

While talking on their uniqueness, Jaspreet shared why they could acquired a Fortune 500 customer who was earlier using data backup solution, offered by Veritas.

Dr. Natarajan concluded the session by acknowledging the entrepreneurs for the confidence they displayed in their venture and also assured them that NASSCOM is there to provide them the platform to take their venture to the next level.

Please read the full blog post at nasscom emerge blog  -http://blog.nasscom.in/emerge/2008/08/11/nasscom-showcase-of-emerging-product-companies/

New features and improvements include -

1. Up to 25% performance improvement specially while backing up over the WAN. (Details)
2. Upgrade support for 1.x and 2.0 installations.
3. Unicode path/file-name support.
4. Log file path support for XP/Vista and misc. bug fixes.

A detailed list can be found in Release Notes.

Download 30 day evaluation copy - http://www.druvaa.com/download/insync.html

For further information and sales queries please contact sales@druvaa.com

About Druvaa inSync
Druvaa inSync offers upto 10 times faster enterprise notebook backup compared to traditional methods with 90% reduction in bandwidth and storage utilization. The solution uses advanced data de-duplication technology to backup data duplicate between users only once. On restore the user sees a timeline view of data and can restore from any point in the past.

More information about the product - http://www.druvaa.com/products/insync.html

About Druvaa
Formed in 2007, Druvaa Software is a leading provider of Continuous Data Protection and Disaster Recovery solutions. Since inception Druvaa has released two products - Druvaa Replicator (Continuous Data Protection and Disaster Recovery) and Druvaa inSync (Enterprise Laptop Backup). Druvaa is angel funded by Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Accord Internation (HK).

About Druvaa - http://www.druvaa.com/about/
About Products - http://www.druvaa.com/products/

While working on inSync 2.1, team Druvaa rediscovered some tips and tricks for performance improvement -

It’s not sufficient to just reduce the network bandwidth usage. It’s equally important to completely utilize your share of the network bandwidth.

Caching frequently used data reduces the database queries or disk reads. Database queries and disk reads may not consume the CPU cycles but they add to the latency in a big way.

Synchronous writes are slow. Some writes, for example activity logs, can be delayed indefinitely. Other writes that need persistance gurantees can be synced in batches than individually.

This holds true for both databases and file systems. It’s cheaper to do multiple inserts in one sqlite transaction than to create one transaction for each insert. On the file system side, you are better

off writing a few MBytes to a file, followed by a fsync than multiple few KBytes of writes and a fsync for each write.

Batch requests

For inSync 2.1, we found that the lowest hanging fruits were with the database and file system interactions. We sure plucked all of them

Druvaa, an enterprise data backup solutions provider, recently launched their new product, Druvaa inSync. InSync is an enterprise PC backup system, that boasts 10x faster data backup while reducing 90% of the bandwidth and storage utilization.

InSync is based around a new technology from Druvaa called SendUnique, that creates a fingerprint for each file to prevent duplication. When 80% of enterprise files and communication are common between users, de-duplication is an important consideration. SendUnique uses a Single Instance File System on the backup server, and compares the file fingerprints during the backup to the files already on the server to determine if it’s unique data. This works especially well for remote notebook computer users who have essentially the same data on multiple computers. There is also a timeline-based system to track changes to existing files in order to restore point-in-time data from any specific time.

Some other new solutions have attempted to fix these problems, but in very different ways. Microsoft Single Instance Service, and Data-Domain both attempt to filter out similar data through traditional single-instancing at backup server level. Newer solutions like Avamar (EMC) and PureDisk (Veritas, a division of Symantec), filter content at the backup-server level before sending data to a remote store. All of these solutions save bandwidth and storage, but the calculations weigh down the CPU and simple block checksum matching often fails to interpret common data.

Druvaa is a new startup based in India, and has received $250,000 in a seed round from the Indian Angel Network in January 2008. They recently were awarded the Indian Entrepreneurial Challenge 2008 Award, chosen out of 8 finalists and 140 applications.

For backups, both the storage cost and the bandwidth availability are not able to catch up with increasing storage demand.

Take iPhone as example. The amount of storage in iPhone has increased from 4Gb to 16GB, but the media and bandwidth available for backup hasn’t changed much.

The problem is particularly challenging for remote and on-the-go backups. Its an interesting fact (i read somewhere) that almost 200 Million enterprise users are working remotely at any given time. And its a very good possibility that they wouldn’t have backed their data.

This is where Druvaa inSync comes in. The SendUnique technology, ensures that the duplicate data on enterprise devices is backed up just once, giving a clear 90% advantage for bandwidth and storage used for backup

Currently we ship the product for only notebooks, but soon plan to cover every device connected to enterprise network from PDA to Servers.

Any takers ?

We are delighted to announce that Druvaa software has won the Indian Entrepreneurial Challenge 2008 award.

Eight  teams were shortlisted based on their potential scale of the business, the strength of the team and sustainable differentiation in the business model of 140 business plans that were submitted.

These shortlisted applicants were invited to participate in the final round which saw them presenting their plans and ideas in detail to an eminent jury of the country’s leading entrepreneurs and corporate heads (which includes Pramod Bhasin (CEO & President, Genpact), Raman Roy (Chairman, Quatrro BPO Solutions), Saurabh Srivastava (President, TIE Delhi), Sanjeev Bikhchandani (co-founder and CEO of Naukri.com), Mahesh Murthy (Partner, Seedfund) and Alok Mittal (Managing Director, Canaan Partners India).

The competition is was organized by Tie (The Indus Entrepreneurs) and Canaan Ventures and was co-sponsored by CNBC-TV18, Business Today, Microsoft, ISB and NASSCOM. The complete event from shortlisting, mentoring and Finals would be covered by Business Today and CNBC (Network 18).

More details with photographs and a video coverage would be posted very soon.

After keeping it beta for more than a month, Druvaa on June 26th announced the general availability of Druvaa inSync v2.0. The idea behind v2.0 is fast and bandwidth/storage efficient backup. The much awaited release, brings two very interesting and unique features -

1. SendUnique - 10x Faster backup with 90% reduction in storage and bandwidth utilization.

Almost 80% of PC data (emails/docs) within an enterprise is common between users. SendUnique technology fingerprints the user’s backup set to send only one copy of data (emails/docs) common between different users to the backup server. This speeds up backup by almost 10 times and cut bandwidth usage by 90%.

2. Eternity - Never Lose a file. Ever.

Timeline based, from-the-past restore. Enables ultimate protection against data loss or virus attacks.

More information about the product - http://www.druvaa.com/products/insync.html

Download evaluation copy - http://www.druvaa.com/download/insync.html

For further information and sales queries please contact sales@druvaa.com

About druvaa

Formed in 2007, Druvaa Software is a leading provider of Continuous Data Protection and Disaster Recovery solutions. Since inception Druvaa has released two products - Druvaa Replicator (Continuous Data Protection and Disaster Recovery) and Druvaa inSync (Enterprise Laptop Backup). Druvaa is angel funded by Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Accord Internation (HK).

About Druvaa - http://www.druvaa.com/about/
About Products - http://www.druvaa.com/products/

Server Backup

Data is very rarely common between production servers of different types. Its not difficult to imagine that Exchange email server may not have same content as Oracle database server. But data is largely duplicate within file-servers, exchange server and say a bunch of ERP servers (development and test). This duplication creates potential bottlenecks for bandwidth and storage used for backup.

Existing players have offered two solutions to this problem -

1. Traditional single-instancing at backup server to filter out common content e.g Microsoft Single Instance Service (in Data center edition). This saves the just storage cost, depending upon at what level to filter commonalities - file / block / byte. A big player in this space is Data-Domain. These solutions don’t have a client component, they just save storage space.
2. New innovative solutions like Avamar (now with EMC) and PureDisk (now with Veritas) which try filter content at backup server level before the data goes to the (remote) store. This makes these solutions much better suited for remote-office backups. They save bandwidth and storage.

But, there are two unsolved problems with both these approaches as well ( Which also, explains a poor response for these products in the market )-

1. most of the times simple block checksum matching fails to figure out common data, as it may not fall on block boundaries . Eg. if you insert a simple byte in a file, the whole file changes and all the blocks shift. And the block checksum approach fails.
2. Checksum calculation is very costly and makes backups CPU exhaustive.
3. These approaches are targeting storage cost, not time/bandwidth which is more critical.

PC Backups

The problem is much more complex at PC level, as duplicated data is distributed among users and is as high as 90% in some cases. Emails / documents and similar file formats create large pool of duplicate data between users.

Also, since 50% of PC backup is mainly large email files, this is problem is particularly difficult to solve using simple file based de-duplication techniches used by servers.

Druvaa inSync v2.0 uses a on-wire (distributed) de-duplication technique which senses duplicate data before the backup starts and hences skips it from the backup. This is transparent to the user, all he notices is a 10 times boost in backup speed with over 90% reduction in bandwidth and storage usage.

How it works

This technology creates and maintains a Global “Single Instance” File System at backup server. Each time a user wants to backup a file, the insync clients prepares a file-fingerprint (using linear polynomial based hash) and compares it with the server. After the server sends a response, the backup happens only for the “unique” data within the file.

The (patent pending) advance file-fingerprinting makes it computationally very easy to filter common content like - same paragraphs in different documents, a same CCed email, media rich corporate presentations etc. This cuts down time for backup by 10 times and reduces bandwidth and storage utilization by 90%.

Other Interesting Features

Another good use of the Gobal Single Instance File System is - Continuous Data protection. The user after starting the restore can see how his files changes over time. Which gives him an option to restore point-in-time data from any point in the past. The marketing name for the feature is - “Eternity. Never lose a file. Ever.” A long name, but serves its meaning

Business Opportunities

The same technology/product can be stripped down to backup PDAs and scaled up to backup servers. A good use case would be to reduce time for backup of bunch of related remote servers.

1. SendUnique - Enterprise wide on-wire data de-duplication. Almost 80% of PC data (emails/docs) within an enterprise is common between users. SendUnique technology fingerprints the user’s backup set to send only one copy of data (emails/docs) common between different users to the backup server. This speeds up backup by almost 10 times and cut bandwidth usage by 90%.

2. Eternity - Never Loose a file. Ever. Timeline based, from-the-past restore. Enables ultimate protection against data loss or virus attacks.

3. NetworkSense - Automatic network sensing and prioritization. Allocates a user defined percentage of bandwidth for backups.

4. TrueSecure - Client triggered secure backups. 256 byte network (SSL) and 256 bit (AES) storage encryption.

You can sign up here for beta evaluation and updates.

The following presentations describes the 2.0 feature set -

| View | Upload your own

Druvaa Software today announced the general availability of Druvaa Replicator version 2.0. Druvaa Replicator is a volume data replication and disaster recovery solution. It near-synchronously and non-disruptively replicates production data to target storage across heterogeneous operating environments (storage, application and OS) and over unlimited distances. The new release brings significant performance improvements for large servers and WAN based replication.

The new release comes with five key improvements -

1. Performance improvements in replication agent specially for large servers
2. Caching server is now an optional and separately priced
3. Intelligent Data compression, minimal de-duplication and enhanced caching support at Caching Server
4. Advanced reporting with detailed/searchable activity log
5. Simplified user interface and license management

Version 2.0 is released on Microsoft Windows 2000/2003 server and RedHat Enterprise Linux release 4.x/5.x

More information about the product - http://www.druvaa.com/products/replicator.html

Evaluation version of Replication 2.0 can be directly downloaded from - http://www.druvaa.com/download/replicator.html
For further information and sales queries please contact sales@druvaa.com

About druvaa

Formed in 2007, Druvaa Software is a leading provider of Continuous Data Protection and Disaster Recovery solutions. Since inception Druvaa has released two products - Druvaa Replicator (Continuous Data Protection and Disaster Recovery) and Druvaa inSync (Enterprise Laptop Backup). Druvaa is angel funded by Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Accord Internation (HK).

About Druvaa - http://www.druvaa.com/about/
About Products - http://www.druvaa.com/products/