Druva cloud migration enhanced by CloudLanes acquisition

Druva Cloud Platform is expanding its reach to on-premises environments with the acquisition of CloudLanes.

Druva chief product officer Mike Palmer said the vendor intends to integrate CloudLanes' file system and cloud storage gateway into Druva Cloud Platform. The technology would allow Druva customers to move data and applications from on-premises to the cloud.

CloudLanes software provides two major functions. It serves as a high-speed cloud storage gateway that allows for securely moving large amounts of data to the cloud quickly. The second function automates the processing and transforming of data once it's in the public cloud, including the ability to make single file restores.

Druva Cloud Platform – consisting of Druva inSync, Phoenix and CloudRanger – has focused on providing data protection and management for cloud environments. The CloudLanes acquisition Druva's capabilities to on-premise environments.

"The gap we had was the ability to service workloads that need an on-premises restore option," Palmer said. "CloudLanes allows us to address the narrow but important cases where customers really need local resilience and local restore capabilities."

According to CloudLanes co-founder and CEO Abhijit Dinkar, the three-year-old company had around 12 employees and 24 customers.

Dinkar said the CloudLanes deal was brewing since the first week of April. The acquisition closed around the time of Druva's $130M funding round.

"After they got a bunch of money, you kind of knew they were going on an acquisitive trail," said Phil Goodwin, research director at IT market research company IDC. "I think it's a good acquisition for them."

Goodwin said Druva's business model has always been "everything in the cloud," and going after the ability to re-host existing workloads in the cloud is a smart move. Hybrid cloud is currently the dominating architecture, so it's important that Druva can operate under that kind of setup. Data mobility is a key part of a hybrid cloud environment, and it's something all data protection vendors should be investing in. 

"We're moving away from a backup and recovery-oriented environment to one that's more oriented toward application availability," Goodwin said. "Being able to move workloads and data seamlessly from on-premise to cloud and back is an important capability for organizations. It's not enough to just back up and recover data anymore."

Palmer said this was a gap Druva had been looking to fill via acquisition. CloudLanes has a robust, tested, durable and scalable file system, and Druva executives say they can tightly integrate it into Druva Cloud Platform's architecture within six months. Palmer said versions of Druva using CloudLanes technology will be ready by the end of 2019.

This is Druva's second acquisition, following its 2018 purchase of CloudRanger.

After they got a bunch of money, you kind of knew they were going on an acquisitive trail.

Unlike with the CloudRanger acquisition, CloudLanes will not continue as a separate business entity. Its technology will be built into Druva Cloud Platform.

"Between the data mover and the local file system providing us a great restore point, CloudLanes is an integral part of our existing solution," Palmer said. "We are not running this as a separate business unit in any way, shape or form."

CloudLanes' founders, lead architects and engineers all joined Druva, but there were some developers who did not make the transition. Palmer could not disclose what becomes of CloudLanes' two dozen customers as a result of the acquisition, only saying that a third-party business entity is involved.

Now that the on-premises gap is filled, Palmer said Druva is looking to support more enterprise applications and platforms. The vendor will be looking to acquire or partner with companies that support applications that are going to be relevant in the next three to five years.

However, Palmer said Druva will continue to spend much of its resources building capabilities in-house. Right now, Druva is aggressively building support for Nutanix AHV and AWS Outposts.