Software-defined storage company Druva bought CloudRanger, which provides Amazon Web Services (AWS) backup and disaster recovery, for an undisclosed price.
Founded in September 2014, CloudRanger has raised $1.1 million to date. The startup’s technology will speed time to market for Druva’s Apollo data management software-as-a-service (SaaS), said Dave Packer, VP of product at Druva.
The Druva Cloud Platform provides centralized data management and protection across public, private, and hybrid clouds. The company last November announced plans to build Apollo, which will be delivered via the platform.
Apollo will enable data management for information-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud workloads on a single policy control plane. It will support data that lives in AWS, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).
“CloudRanger helps us accelerate the time to market,” Packer said. An integrated product should be available next quarter, he added. “We saw an opportunity to move faster along that path in what we see as a very fast-growing market. It’s an area that we felt needed a bigger investment in.”
The acquisition also boosts Druva’s platform as it competes with the likes of Rubrik and Cohesity. These SD-storage startups also provide cloud data management for secondary storage.
Bridging Data Silos
Despite earlier hype, enterprise customers aren’t moving 100 percent of their workloads to public clouds. “From a product standpoint, what this enable us to do is really bridge the two worlds of data management on prem and in the cloud,” Packer said. “There’s going to be some mix of on prem and cloud, but customers want a single way to manage it all from a disaster recovery and backup perspective.”
Packer used one customer with 68 AWS accounts as an example. The company didn’t have a single pane-of-glass visibility into all of its data, and it didn’t know what data lived in which account. “They don’t know what needs to be running, what data can be disposed of, and when they get the bill they don’t know how to reconcile what they have in AWS with what’s in the bill,” he said. “Being able to provide this context, end to end, can really help people.”
Additionally, the company’s platform, which provides deduplication, governance, visibility, and analytics, also helps enterprises comply with legal and regulatory requirements.
$80 Million Funding Round
In August 2017, Druva closed an $80 million funding round, bringing its total to almost $200 million.
The funding, combined with today’s acquisition, signals Druva’s next phase, Packer said. “The $80 million was fundamentally the green light to us to move the company up to the next level,” he said. “But with any company, that first acquisition is critical. Not only does it show you are firing on all cylinders, but it also really shows the growth trajectory. It’s a big step for Druva as a company. It means we’re over that startup phase and we’re a much more formidable company.”