Rubrik Reviews

We back up our virtual infrastructure with it. We have about 400 virtual machines that we back up.

We are using its latest version. We upgraded just recently.

It is basically a backup solution, and we use it when we need to. We have had Veeam, IBM TSM, and a couple of other solutions before this. From the business perspective, the users don't see anything different other than submitting a ticket saying that they need something restored.

Our DBAs utilize it as well. They do test environments. They'll pull stuff from the backup system into their testing areas so they can test different scenarios, and so far, they're liking it fairly well, which is completely different from when we utilized Veeam. We basically had to go and do it for them. With this, we were able to offhand different tasks to different departments, and they could do their own tasks. So, it has made it much easier in terms of infrastructure where we can give other departments the ability to perform their own tasks and projects.

Its reporting is most valuable. I like how it reports that everything is successfully backed up. It provides a summarized report that I can give to auditors and management.

Their documentation can be improved to provide information about how some of the things work.

They should give more access to the backend capabilities. From a customer point of view, you do not have access to all the features on the system. You have to engage their support to perform some of the tasks. It would be helpful for an experienced engineer to be able to go and do some of those tasks prior to contacting the support.

I have been using this solution for about three or four years.

There are no issues on the side of Rubrik itself. Rubrik seems to be very stable, especially when it comes to their physical installs. If it's a physical backup appliance, it works really well.

So far, we've not had any issues at all. We have 16 nodes on one site, and we also have several virtual Rubriks where it's just a single instance. So, we have a range of different configurations, and all of them scale pretty decently.

We have about 10 users who use it directly. Its usage depends on the day. At times, it's heavily used, and at other times, it's not. It's a come and go thing.

We contact their technical support a lot. It is about two times a week, but it's usually where we've gone beyond the norm of what a normal customer utilizes the system for. So far, they have been very responsive, and nine times out of 10, they are able to accomplish the task that we're trying to perform.

We had Veeam before this, and we've also had IBM TSM, Tivoli. We've also used a couple of other solutions out there.

We switched because the cost of Veeam was too much. After 200 core licenses, the support cost was almost the same as buying Rubrik for the first time.

I've been here 13 years, and I actually deployed it. I've deployed five different sites, so we don't have just one. For the most part, it was pretty straightforward. It took about 30 minutes.

The first time, we used a consultant from Rubrik, and after that, we did it ourselves. Our experience with them was exceptional. It was really good.

I don't remember the cost, but I know that for Veeam, we were spending almost $250,000 a year for 205 licenses. It was an enterprise version. When we purchased Rubrik, it was just a little bit more. It was not a terribly huge amount, and if I recall, that was for three years of support as well. So, Veeam priced itself out of the market at a certain point in time.

In terms of additional costs, there are some add-ons that they have built. Since the time we purchased it, there have been different cloud offerings. When you purchase the appliance or Rubrik basic services, you get all services. As far I'm aware, you don't necessarily have to purchase extra things. They don't nickel and dime you.

I would advise others to do a PoC, test it, and see how well it works. They should compare it to some of the other solutions that they can PoC as well. That's because we've seen that there are a couple of places in our environment where Veeam still makes logical sense versus Rubrik. Rubrik is able to hit about 95% to 98% of the things that we want to do, which is not going to be the case for every company, but it will fit most customers' needs.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. They're able to hit the mark about 95% to 98% of the time, and when we have problems, they're able to jump on and help out. We're always able to work through it. Sometimes, it might take time. There is no perfect product out there that I'm aware of, or else we would look at it.

We have the r6000 series as the physical appliance. We also have the Rubrik Edge, which is a virtual appliance, depending where it is deployed. So, we have three strategic data centers where we are placing physical appliances. For test purposes and some branch offices, we are using the virtual appliance.

Most of our workloads (98 or 99 percent) are virtual on-prem, then half a percent are physical and half a percent are in the cloud. In the cloud, we have both AWS and GCP, but it is still very light. We are in the process of migrating a percentage of our on-prem workloads into the cloud.

We are in a telecom environment, so we have a lot of homegrown applications based on the Linux operating system. We have MSSQL and MySQL as well on the Linux environment. We are also protecting Windows Active Directory. We don't have a lot of proprietary applications, like SAP, but we have Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Active Directory, a couple of file servers, and the rest are mostly home-developed applications.

The main benefit is that we are secured in terms of workloads. We know that if we need to restore any VMs, or even any files inside a VM, that we will succeed 100 percent. This means that we don't need to spend much time administering the backup environment because we know it is self-healing and efficient. So, we are spending that time on something else, which is always a plus.

We use Polaris. Polaris is the front-end, which provides us a centralized view of all our Rubrik deployments in the company. It is a way to see each event's alert reporting and have a map of the world where you have Rubrik deployments.

A backup solution can help you with downtime. When you have something to correct, then it means that you need an immediate activity/action to restore the service. With Rubrik, we can immediately restore the corrupt data or VM. You don't need to worry about finding, loading, and indexing the date, then finding the relevant information to initiate a restore. With Rubrik, we don't need all those activities. We just need to do the search, click for the right VM, and push the restore button. That is it. We can probably reduce the downtime by a factor of 10 without any depth.

Rubrik's web interface is an eight out of 10. It is very easy to use, clear, and responsive. You don't need to click into many different places to get the information that you are looking for; it is intuitive. I like it a lot.

The SLA-based policy automation that Rubrik brought to market five years ago was really a game changer. In the previous backup product, you always managed your backups on a job basis, so what you needed to do is, to say, "Okay, I'd like to backup that specific workload, but I need to stop at this time." With Rubrik, it is completely different. You just need to configure an SLA, saying, "Okay, I would like to have a daily backup," or "I would like to do a backup every six hours. However, Rubrik, start when you think it's the most appropriate time." Then, you don't need to manage maintenance or backup windows anymore. In our environment, where we have based our data centers in the US, Europe, and Asia, it is not a headache anymore to configure our backup jobs, since Rubrik deals with it. When you configure the Rubrik environment, it is a few clicks. Then, you are good to go, and it's already doing backups by itself.

The solution’s archival functionality is very interesting because you have a lot of options. You can either archive on-prem or in the cloud. On-prem, you have the choice between object storage and block storage, which is nice, as it fits any environment. Archiving in the cloud is very easy as well. There is no support in GCP and AWS history in Glacier, so it is a very good option. 

It is easy to offload your local storage. If your brick is becoming full, you have two options: 

1. You buy an extra brick, expanding the cluster, but it has a cost. 
2. You can decide to archive your data. This means that the snapshots that you have on the Rubrik cluster can be migrated to another place. Another place can be either in the same data center or in the cloud. This is a great option, and we are using it.

We are scripting a lot using the Rubrik API to gather some information about usage, monitor what is going on, or do some very specific actions, like initiating a backup from the command line within a scripted environment. So, it is very handy.

There is a search feature inside the cluster. So, if you want to restore a specific file from a snapshot, you can then do a search inside the snapshot. The time that it takes to find and recover applications/files is almost instant. In the previous backup software that we were using, we didn't have the ability to dig inside and browse the snapshot, or even search inside the snapshot to find the required file. We can find instantly what we were looking for by searching inside a snapshot because Rubrik is maintaining a metadata DB where we can find anything that we want. Whether it is on-prem or archived already in the cloud, we can find anything using this search mechanism.

There is always room for improvement with some shortcuts for the web interface. They could make it even more beautiful. While there is always room for improvement, it is already a great product from a UI point of view.

It would be nice if we could do a live mount of the Nutanix AHV VMs, but this is not really an issue on the Rubrik side. This is more an issue on the Nutanix side because they need to share the relevant API to allow Rubrik to do that. I know Rubrik is intensively discussing with Nutanix to solve this problem, or at least to open this functionality to the rest of its customers. That would be nice to have the Nutanix AHV live mount, but this is probably for the future. I know it is on the roadmap, but it is not easy because there are some politics between the two vendors.

Today, there is no way to migrate archives from one location to another. This is being evaluated by Rubrik at this time. I know because I am pretty much involved with the Rubrik engineering team as a customer advocate.

I have been using it for about four years.

We have been a customer for the last four years without any hardware failure. That is one aspect of its reliability. 

Like many other modern solutions, Rubrik is architected as a web-scale solution. This means that if you are running out of space, just stack another brick on top of the existing ones. You can stack bricks until a couple of racks are full. It is very easy. 

Scalability-wise, when we expand the cluster, it is non-destructive and non-disruptive. So, we can stack, and while it is stacking, we can still have backups running. Nobody notices that you are actually expanding.

We have active administrators of the Rubrik platform at this time.

If you have any issues with the software, then the Rubrik support is trained and responsive enough to get you covered. I would rate the technical support as a nine (out of 10).

Rubrik selected a bunch of customers who are active with the product, trying to make it evolve. From time to time, we do meetings saying, "Okay, what could be nice to have in the future?" They are taking advice from the real users, and I am a part of that.

We were looking at a way to standardize our data security platform, because we were using a lot of different software, like Veeam, Aranda, HPE Data Protector, etc. In total, it was something like six or seven different backup solutions. It was completely scary to manage on a day-to-day basis. Depending where in the world that we needed to do backups, it was a different software. 

It was completely crazy to manage, not only because you needed specific knowledge of the product, but also because every product didn't have the same behavior and capabilities. This was one of the many issues that we had. Then, we decided to standardize into a common platform everywhere, and that was why we switched to Rubrik. 

The main driver was to find a way to back up over where Nutanix stressed us, because we are a Nutanix customer. At that time, not many vendors were able to protect Nutanix AHV workloads, but Rubrik was one of them, and we decided to do a trial with them. It was absolutely successful in each aspect. It was easy to use and efficient. You didn't need to worry about our restore tests, which were very easy. So, the use case that we have was to protect our Nutanix workloads and SQL DBs. Also, the flexibility that Rubrik has given us is absolutely crazy.

15 minutes is the time that you need to deploy a Rubrik cluster from unboxing to the first backup. In other words, the initial setup is very easy and straightforward. As soon as you have the network ready to accept the hardware, the right credentials to configure the different vCenters in the Nutanix cluster, and all the backup elements, 15 minutes is the time that you need to be up and running.

I deployed it myself. It is too easy to involve a third-party, which would be a waste of time and money.

Rubrik has reduced the time that we spend on recovery testing. Previously, when somebody was requesting to restore a file, everybody was trying to escape that task. Now, it is the opposite. Everybody wants to do it, because it is so simple.

We don't need to manage our backups anymore. We just need to configure them, and from time to time, check if everything is okay. If something is wrong, then we will get an email from Rubrik anyway. It is almost a product that you can configure once, then forget it. The time that I am spending on Rubrik daily is less than half an hour. This time allocation is for anything that is data protection-related.

You need to understand what you're getting for the price. You are getting a backup solution, which is state of the art and works absolutely flawlessly. You are getting the storage needed to store your backups. You have all the sexy features that a modern backup solution can provide you, like deduplication, erasure coding, compression, fast execution time, secured data, and top-notch customer support. So, it might be expensive on paper. It's not free, but when you analyze what you are getting and the time you can spend on other stuff, then Rubrik is very cost-efficient.

We started to use Rubrik Go about a year ago. It is a bit of pity that we discovered that only two years ago, because Rubrik Go is the best solution for us because we are an OpEx company. This means that we are using leasing a lot. All our previous appliances have been leased with a third-party. If we knew that Rubric Go existed, we probably would have used it a long time ago because you are dealing with only one vendor, which is Rubrik. This brings two very important advantages:

1. As soon as there is a hardware refresh, you can benefit from that hardware refresh at no cost. It's already included. So, if I know that in a couple of months, there will be a new hardware released by Rubrik. What will happen next, they will provide us with the new hardware and send an engineer to migrate all the data from the old version. Then, they will take the old version back with them. This is great. I don't know another vendor who does this.
2. We have access to the Polaris framework because it is included. We have started to use Polaris because of the Rubrik Go initiative.

We looked at the next version of Veeam. Back then, it was not satisfying. We identified three issues: 

1. Veeam is only a software. With Veeam, you still need to find storage in the company to deploy the tool and store the backups. This is not the case with Rubrik, which is a turnkey solution. You have everything: the storage, compute, and software. 
2. Veeam was still using the old way of managing backup jobs, meaning that you need to say, "Okay, at that time, I need to start that job. At that time, I need to start that other job, etc." It was very complicated. Since then, Veeam also moved to an SLA-based policy. So, they actually copied Rubrik. 
3. The lack of Nutanix AHV support, though Veeam now supports this.

I'm still convinced that Rubrik was the best choice for the company because it is so easy and efficient.

The best thing to do at first is to start a PoC. Usually, you can get the physical hardware onsite for a month, then you can play around with it and be involved with the product from day one because you will see it works. You will enjoy it a lot and won't want to give the PoC hardware back to Rubrik because it's so impressive. That is what happened to us. We kept the hardware for two months. I was actually negotiating with Rubrik to keep it longer. I was battling internally to convince the management to get the first brick, knowing we have 15 bricks all over the world. If you start and test it, then you will love it.

We are not using Polaris Radar to get more insights about ransomware.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10) because perfection doesn't exist.

We have it onsite and in the cloud. We also make use of their SaaS offering as well.

Primarily, we back up our VMware estate. We back up Azure VMs and Office 365 as well as some physical boxes.

We used to be on r348, so now we're on r6408.

Rubrik provides us with all our backup services: onsite backups, Office 365 Backups, and Azure Backups (IaaS).

We can now just point the solution at our virtual environment and know that we are protected. No longer do we have to manage backup jobs. The simplicity of the SLA-based policy automation means that we are just protected.

Rubrik sits alongside things, like the VMware SRM product, so we can use it in a PowerShell integration. We can test and verify our backups using the Live Mount functionality. That is saving us probably one or two days a month.

Rubrik is a faster unit from a hardware perspective. Things, like Live Mount, mean we can bring services back straightaway, then have them transition back into the live storage in the background. Because we can use Live Mount to do instant restores, a restore is now a five-minute job. Then, the rest of it is done in the background, rather than doing something for an hour before you actually get the restore back.

I have one man-day a week back across the team to do other more important jobs. So, it's not saving us money from that point of view. However, it allows my team to concentrate on the things that matter, rather than having to worry about the backup.

• Backs up all our platforms. 
• Its ease of use and single pane of glass management.
• Performance. 
• Lowers our overall management costs; we don't have to look after it anymore.

The solution's web interface is clean, simple, and easy to use.

Its archival functionality is great. We have used that from day one for Azure. The cloud backup was one of the key reasons to switch.

We use their predictive search. It is very much like your standard, usual search engine type approach. You can type in simple English and get results back from that. The easier the interface is to use, then the more time is saved in other peripheral tasks.

I would like to see the entire Office 365 product suite backed up by Rubrik. For instance, they do SharePoint and Exchange online, but they don't back up Microsoft Teams. So, I would like to see more of the Office 365 suite added into their backup capabilities.

I have been using it for three years.

The stability is fantastic. We have not had any downtime. We have not had any issues with it at all. It has been good and stable.

We have not had to scale too far. We have six nodes at the moment and are capable of going to 32 nodes, if we need to. We don't really make use of that scalability, but I know other customers who do. I would be quite happy to scale it, if we need to.

There are six people who know how to use Rubrik at Cranfield. This is my systems team: cloud engineers and systems admins. 

We used the support services a couple of times early on, because we were quite early adopters. They were fantastic. When you speak to support, you get an engineer who knows what they are doing straightaway. There is no multi-tiered support, so you get someone very quickly who knows exactly what your issues are. Nine times out of 10, we have had a resolution extremely quickly.

After the first month, we did not really use support because the solution worked fine. So, we used support early on, and they were great. Since then, we have not had to use support, which is even better.

Before we had Veeam, we were with Dell EMC Data Domain storage.

We previously were a Veeam customer. With Rubrik, we could replicate directly into Azure. That released the operational costs of having a third-party hosted solution offsite. We have been able to remove that, managing it directly in Azure.

From Rubrik being delivered to it ingesting backups, it took about an hour. To get it out of the box, racked, configured, and ready to go was simple. To be perfectly honest, we have probably never used a product that was as simple as it to deploy.

We had a two-week window set to migrate our backups from the old system into Rubrik. Instead of it taking two weeks, it ended up taking three days, which saved us time tremendously.

They were two IT systems administrators involved in the initial setup and deployment. I have a general team of cloud engineers who do the storage, cloud, and virtualization.

Managing backups, we have saved about 85 percent of the time from our previous solution.

We removed a software product, then removed the servers. We did not have to support servers nor storage arrays that it runs on, having a single platform to do everything. That led to TCO savings.

With our old service, managing the whole environment was about a day a week per person. Now, we are lucky if it is five minutes a day. From a complete solution and backup relation, we are saving 85 to 90 percent of our management time.

Return on investment primarily goes back to time savings. It allows my guys to spend time doing things that I need them to do rather than babysitting quite a labor-intensive backup service.

Originally, we bought the units on perpetual licenses. Now, we have switched to Rubrik Go. I think the Rubrik Go subscription is a better model, where it is based on your onsite environment and you consume what you use.

Going to subscription makes it more affordable because then the university does not have to find so much capital to spend upfront. Knowing that we are entering a deal for a number of years with fixed yearly payments allows me to manage budgets better.

We looked at Veeam with Data Domain, Cohesity, and NetApp. We looked to do it all with Microsoft Azure Backup services. However, the only one that really fit our environment and had the vision for what we were trying to do was the Rubrik solution.

Cost and complexity are probably the main reasons as well as the flexibility of the service that we can get. So, we are on that public cloud journey where services are moving between on-prem and the cloud. Rubrik offered us those enablement services. It allowed us to do the transition pieces that we needed or still need now. So, it was an all in one feature set. At the time, their vision and direction matched our vision and direction.

Make sure you know your environment, so you know what you are putting in it before you start. It really does do what they say it does. The real takeaway is just make sure that you are aware of their products and capabilities, and that you can match them appropriately to your environment.

We haven't had any events of ransomware that required us to do that restore. However, we also have Polaris Radar in place to help us detect ransomware anomalies as well as Polaris Sonar that we use for compliance and malware detection. We have used Polaris for reporting on metadata, but not to extract it anywhere else.

Polaris hasn't necessarily changed our approach, but it has given us extra reassurances around key factors, like governance, compliance, ransomware activity, and cloud mobility. Whilst we have our internal policies and procedures in place, it is a tool that effectively is scanning our entire environment, helping to alert and bring issues to the fore if we have any of those problems.

We use the API to automate some of our processes, but we don't have it integrated into any of our other products.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

We are using Rubrik for most of our enterprise backup solutions.

Our development team was taking a long time with our earlier backup solution to restore the previous versions whenever there was some change in version. With Rubrik, we have a Live Mount where we can go back at any time and do the Live Mount, which saves us a lot of time from the development point of view. It helps the development team test all the scenarios with the earlier version and compare them with the new versions.

Rubrik is an easy and automatic solution that needs no manual intervention. With its air gap protection and multi-factor authentication, Rubrik is safe for us. The Live Mount feature of Rubrik is the most beneficial feature for us.

We have some challenges with the solution's reporting because historical reports have some limitations. We have raised those concerns with Rubrik, and they are working on it.

I have been using Rubrik for three to four years.

Rubrik is a stable solution.

Rubrik is a scalable solution. We have to do the sizing properly during the initial purchase so that there is no immediate requirement for expansion. We are using the solution in our data center. Only the admin has access to the solution, whereas all our enterprise server backups are on Rubrik. We have around 200 servers.

Based on strategies, we decide on future growth and monitor the dashboard to know if we are supposed to have additional nodes or expansions.

We switched from a different solution to Rubrik because of better performance during the restoration. With our previous solution, backup was quick, but restoration took time. Since we experienced the Live Mount in Rubrik, we decided to go with it.

The solution's initial setup was not so complex and not straightforward. Since we had a different solution, understanding this concept was a bit time-consuming. Otherwise, it was smooth and straight.

We did a POC before implementing Rubrik. We had a POC appliance in place, and we tested it for some days before deciding to move to Rubrik. We had a thorough testing on our premises with the test product and then decided on the final purchase. The solution was deployed by a team of two to three people in approximately two weeks.

We have seen a return on investment with Rubrik.

Rubrik is a little bit expensive, but it's worth the price.

We are using Rubrik for most of our enterprise backup solutions. We have expanded it to our other data centers also. It has been performing very well for us for some time now. We don't have any issues with the solution.

Rubrik provides a lot of time-saving and a minimal amount of administrator involvement. With Rubrik, we have saved a lot of time in restoration, and no additional storage space is required for restoration. We can do the live recovery or Live Mount to test and verify.

It's not difficult to maintain the solution because everything is monitored and supported remotely. Users need to have an initial understanding of sizing before implementing Rubrik to have a fair idea of their required capacity.

Overall, I rate Rubrik a nine out of ten.

We primarily use it for data backup for VMware as well as AIX, which is an IBM platform. We also use it for the value-adds that Rubrik brings, including Live Mount.

We are on version 5.2 right now. We upgrade every little while. The version of the appliance is the r500 series.

Our environments are virtual and physical. We don't protect anything in the cloud currently.

Rubrik protects AIX versions 6 and 7, then primarily Windows and Linux hosted on VMware vSphere. We also do some standalone Linux and Windows boxes. As a subset of the Windows, we protect a lot of SQL Server databases. We do some IBM databases as well, but primarily SQL Server on Windows.

We like that Rubrik is SLA-based. Instead of us defining specific policies to specific servers, we create the SLAs which are kind of the foundation of your backup strategy. We then assign objects, servers, databases, or whatever we're protecting to an SLA. The SLAs work well, as in, they do what you expect, which seems intuitive. However, coming from our previous backup solution, backup software and intuition don't always go together. So, we are very happy.

Their Live Mount technology uses Rubrik as storage, while using our Cisco UCS Blades as compute for rapid restores of backups, which is really awesome. That is one of the biggest value-adds that Rubrik provides. It saves time as well as being easy and works well. Our previous backup solution restores were cumbersome, time-consuming, and labor intensive to do. They required a lot of validation. With Rubrik Live Mount, you can restore a system in well under a minute, whereas it would take up to hours in the past.

Live Mount is where we do the majority of our big recoveries, unless it is a file recovery. A file recovery takes a few minutes to restore to where the file in the event a file was accidentally deleted by a user, etc. There has been at least a 90 percent reduction in recovery time based on our previous solution, from the need to recover something to when it's actually recovered went from hours to minutes.

We really like their SQL tools around SQL Server as well as the ability to do transaction log backups and restore to a point-in-time based on those transaction logs. We also like the restore options: restoring in place or mounting a database to another server. Their toolset around SQL Server works really well.

We like the web interface a lot. It is simple, but powerful.

We like the solution’s archival functionality. We currently archive offsite to an NFS store in one location and a cloud S3 location for some other objects. We have been happy with the way that both of those work.

We have used their search, which is powerful.

I would like to see Rubrik better integrate with Microsoft Active Directory. Instead of just backing up a full domain controller, I would like the solution to have Active Directory object knowledge so we can restore specific objects in Active Directory versus restoring the whole domain controller. 

I have been using this solution for about two and a half years.

We are happy with the stability. As far as the stability of the solution, like the software itself, it seems like it has been good. Obviously, it is not perfect, but we have been happy with the upgrade cadence and software release cadence that Rubrik has released with stability fixes and/or bug fixes.

As far as the company goes, they had probably more questions a couple of years ago, but now it seems like Rubrik is one of the big players in the data management sphere, and it doesn't seem like the company is going anywhere, at least as far as we know, which is a comforting thing.

We haven't had to do too much on the scalability front. However, the on-prem scalability makes sense. We are happy with it. We have currently an eight-node cluster on-prem, and if we needed to add more storage, we would essentially add another node or two to our cluster. So, we are happy with our options. We could scale from small to very large easily and with minimal configuration changes.

We have been very pleased every time that we have had to contact their support. Their support has been really good. 

We came from an old IBM solution that was complex. 

The initial setup is straightforward. The hardware install and initial setup went very smoothly and quickly. 

The only issue, two and a half years ago, was that we didn't have a great recommendation on how to back up specifically large servers. There are two different ways that we could do it: 

1. With a full VM snapshot.
2. With a file set level, which basically goes through the server based on a filter and only backs up specific files. 

We initially did the file set method, even though we were backing up everything. That was not the most effective way of doing this. We reversed course and just started backing up everything via vSphere snapshots, which works so much better. However, we probably could have received a little better guidance initially on that front from the guy who came onsite to set the appliance up.

Initial setup, after the planning, was probably only about four hours before we started getting backups. It was about a full week before all the backups were complete. We have some very large file servers that we were backing up. Some of those took a long time to finish for that first full backup.

We switched from our previous backup platform. We just transitioned over to Rubrik, shutting off the backup of the old system one day, then starting to back up with Rubrik the next day. Because most of our servers or objects are in vSphere, our Rubrik integration with vSphere made this very easy.

The main thing would be the time savings for those of us in IT operations. In the past, coming from a complex backup solution that involved disk, tape, and rotating tapes, it ended up being almost a full FTE's job to manage and babysit the backup solution. We are down to under a quarter of an FTE. My manager says that it provided us with an FTE savings, and that frees us up to work on other more value-add things, because backup is not a huge value-add. It's necessary, and Rubrik has a lot of value-add features, but the backing up data isn't a value-add until you need it. So, we are saving between 35 and 40 hours a week.

It is like an insurance for when the inevitable happens. You don't know you need something until the minute you need it, then you need it right away.

Rubrik is not the cheapest solution, but we've been happy with the time savings that we have seen. At least from what we have spent so far, we have been happy with the return on investment.

We did a trial of Polaris Radar, which is ransomware detection. We saw value there, but it didn't fit in our budget, at least for the fiscal year that we were working with it.

I don't think Rubrik Go was an option when we initially purchased this solution.

We evaluated an upgraded version of our IBM solution, because our version was old. We also evaluated Veem. We have been very happy with our selection of Rubrik.

Definitely consider Rubrik if you value a simple, elegant, powerful backup tool.

We did a trial of Rubrik Polaris Radar, which automatically detects file changes that would be an indication of a ransomware infection. We were happy with that. In the event of ransomware, their cloud-based tool would detect it. Also, we would be happy with the way that we could recover. Thankfully, we have not had to put this in practice. We haven't had to recover from ransomware. However, in every test that we have done, we have been very happy with how it works and the concept of immutable backups. Once the data is backed up, it can't be changed. This is important for ransomware recovery, so we are happy with how this would work in the event that we would ever have to use it.

Rubrik's pre-built integrations or API support for integration with other solutions are some things that we would like to explore more in the future, other than just referencing some basic PowerShell commands or referencing the API through some basic PowerShell.

I don't have an example of where we had to recover something from a catastrophic failure, which is good. However, we have confidence that if we did need to, there would be a reduction in downtime because of their recovery features.

Biggest lesson learnt: We don't need to spend as much time managing backups as we used to.

I would rate this solution as 10 (out of 10).

I use the solution in my company, and we use it to protect our on-prem managed servers from Oracle. My company is trying to back up VMware and VMs, which is the reason why we use Rubrik.

The most valuable area I noticed in Rubrik is in the area with the configuring of SQL backup. When we are adding SQL host to Rubrik, it is easy and reliable to configure SQL backups on Rubrik as well as to deal with VMware vCenter. The only thing I noticed in Rubrik is that configuring Oracle Database backup is difficult. When Oracle Database backup is hosted on Windows, configuring Windows on Rubrik is kind of a difficult or tough task.

When it comes to Oracle Database or Linux-based machines, it is easy to configure Oracle Database when we are using Linux. With Windows, it is difficult to configure Oracle Database. If the ease of configuration of Oracle Database while using Linux can be made possible with Windows, it will be a great help to the administrators.

I have experience with Rubrik.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

From what I heard, most of my company's customers are migrating from different backup tools to Rubrik. My organization deals with around ten clients who use the product.

The solution's technical support is really great and good support.

The product's initial setup phase is very admin-friendly.

The setup phase and upgrades issues and configuring Rubrik Edge using vCenter, VMware, or hypervisor. My company has good documentation from Rubrik. By going through the documentation, my company easily sets up a Rubrik-based environment. My company was involved in the deployment process of several Rubrik Edge servers for our customers. I have deployed Rubrik Edge servers using VMware and hypervisors. I have set up new physical Rubrik appliances, after which our company migrated the complete Rubrik to a different site, and we deployed it there.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

I integrated Azure Cloud with Rubrik for archival purposes. When we face a disaster, by using the cloud, we can simply connect as a reader on the different Rubrik brik, and we can make it a plug-and-play kind of stuff, which is a great feature introduced by Rubrik.

I recommend the product to others.

Whenever I work with different customers who use different backup products, I suggest to them how they need to consider migrating to Rubrik. I recommend Rubrik to my company's customers who use legacy backup tools. The product is stable and reliable.

Speaking about the benefits offered by the product, I can say that my company's Rubrik license expired in May 2023. Rubrik's team gave my company a buffer time of two months to upgrade and renew our licenses, and such support was one of the great things I noticed about Rubrik.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case is on-premises backup and cloud DR. We're using the Rubrik appliance with their CDM technology for our on-premises solution. We are also using their CloudOut technology to leverage their cloud DR as part of their offering.

We're backing up Windows infrastructure and on-premises applications such as SQL and Exchange file servers, and we're storing that locally on their appliance. Then, we replicate our environment to the cloud so that in the event of a true disaster, where we lost our physical infrastructure, we'd be able to spin up in the cloud, using their CloudOut technology. This would allow us to be up and running in the cloud until we were able to get infrastructure back online.

The environments that we are backing up are physical and virtual. We don't have any cloud-native environments, so we're not doing any cloud backups right now. We use the cloud, although it is a DR target. Our main task is VM backup, which is between 75% and 80%. We have a few physical boxes that we're backing up, as well. For example, I have the actual hypervisors to back up, and then a few miscellaneous other servers that haven't been virtualized.

The applications and servers that we protect include Microsoft Hyper-V for our virtualized infrastructure, Microsoft SQL server for the SQL side, and all of the other infrastructure, in terms of applications, that is Windows-based. We are very invested in the Microsoft platform and using Rubrik to back all aspects of that up. We do have a couple of Linux-based services running, but I would say that we're 95% Windows-based, whether that's Hyper-V VMs or Microsoft SQL, or Microsoft file servers or IAS app servers. 

One of the ways that Rubrik has improved the way our organization functions is time savings. Coming off of the backup solution we had before, we were spending several hours a week, every day sometimes, dealing with backups that fail. Other issues include trying to make space or deal with an archive target that was offline. We were just spending a lot of time on it.

Being a smaller team, when we spend time just dealing with the backups, that takes away from us being able to work on other projects that support the business growth and support other functions within the organization. With Rubrik, there'll be weeks sometimes that I never log into it. Maybe two, three weeks at a time, I never log into Rubrik because we get email alerts and they have great error handling. If there's an error or something happens, we get an email.

A lot of times, the appliance will take care of itself and then deal with that missed backup, or whatever happened. But that's very rare. It'll go for several months without having an error. A lot of times, the errors are not a Rubrik issue. It's always that Windows did something that caused the backup to fail and Rubrik reruns it, then it works.

Not having to spend any time in the console because we can rely on the alerting and automated reporting has allowed us to focus on other areas of the business and not deal with backups. Essentially, it gives us peace of mind that Rubrik works. It was definitely a change to get used to, not logging in to it. We buy this really cool piece of technology and turns out that we're not in it a whole lot, but that just goes to show Rubrik has a robust solution that we can depend on.

This product has definitely increased productivity because we're not dealing with backups. They work on their own and it does its thing. We made the investment into Rubrik to not have to deal with backups and it delivers on that. This leaves us time to focus on other things because we're not dealing with a backup that failed.

It is difficult to put an exact number on the amount of time that we're saving by using Rubrik, although, with our previous solution, there were weeks where we had to spend several hours dealing with failed backups. On a bad week, it may have been between six and eight hours. On average, by not dealing with backups at all, we are saving several hours a week.

Using the SLA-based policy automation has simplified our data protection operations. We are no longer scheduling backups or trying to figure out availability, or time slots, where we can back up our systems. For example, we don't have to consider things like we've got backups running at 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, or 3:00 AM, and we're trying to find a slot. Instead, the SLA engine that they have is super easy to use and does that job for us.

It was really good for us to move to the SLA-based approach from a traditional backup because we were able to, for business use, cover tasks such as retaining email for one year. In their SLA engine, it's very easy to find that. Another example might be backing up a set of test-SQL servers where we only need 14 days. Through the policy engine, you set what you want the retention to be and it takes care of scheduling and managing those backups.

Once we have them set, they are stable and continue to work because we don't change SLAs often. We define the retention that we need for each app and each service, and then it just works. Overall, the SLA-based approach makes it very easy to achieve your backups.

Luckily, we have not used their ransomware recovery. We've not had any incidents or ransomware where we needed to, but we have tested recovering assets in the event that happens and we've always been able to recover in our test scenarios, in our tabletop exercises. This is the type of feature that you never want to rely on outside of testing because it means that you're having a bad day, so hopefully, we never have to use it. That said, if we do have to, we're confident that it would deliver.

Similar to the case with ransomware, we have been lucky in that we haven't had any major disasters where we had to fully recover anything. In the usual case, where files are lost because something is overwritten, or something gets deleted, it has definitely saved a lot of time with the instant recovery.

Using the predictive file search, we're able to put those files or directories back or roll back a database in a few minutes. It's very quick and has definitely reduced our recovery time. We've not had to do a lot of restores, but when we do have to restore the occasional file or put a database version back, it's very quick and has saved us quite a bit of time from what the old Unitrends system would have looked like.

This product has also saved us time with respect to managing backups. Prior to Rubrik, every day of the week, we were spending an hour or two hours or sometimes longer dealing with backups, and that's now completely gone. There are some times that we go for weeks and don't even log into the appliance because we get the reports and they tell us everything we need. We trust Rubrik because we've had it long enough now that we know that when it says it completed the backup, the backup's there, and if we need it, we can get it back.

The most valuable feature is the Instant Recovery, where we can restore a VM or SQL database or any server or application, and have it up and running on their appliance within a few seconds. The recovery time of the instant restore is instantaneous and there is no complexity to it. What we're recovering doesn't matter to them, and we don't have to wait for it to mount a recovery image or do anything like that. When they say instant, they mean instant.

The ease of use is important to us, as well. It's super easy to get set up. Within a few hours of them deploying the on-premises appliance, we were backing up data locally into the cloud and able to test restores.

Rubrik is really good about releasing updates and we have had no issues with the process. They make it very easy, working with their support when they do put out an update, and they assist with doing the health checks beforehand to ensure that there are no issues. They do a pre-flight check on those updates to ensure that they're compatible with the appliance. Then, we schedule a time off-hours to apply it. They are normally pretty quick and we've never had issues where we had to roll back. They've always been flawless updates.

The CloudOut technology allows us to replicate data in our environment to the cloud, and then it can be spun up and used in the cloud if our physical environment is not available.

The VM backup and the SQL backup are blazingly fast for both backup and recovery.

The web interface is really good. and it's only gotten better with every update. It was good, to begin with, but they've improved the speed and added features in each update. It is a modern interface that works in any browser, and we can get to it from a tablet or computer. The type of device you access it from doesn't matter because it fits all screens, and it's intuitive and easy to use.

The archival functionality is very good. It is very easy to archive data to the cloud, and this is something that we were looking for. You can do it all from their web interface, which is a plus. You don't have to jump into the command-line interface or run scripts or anything to make it work. It is all configurable in the UI and very easy to dump data off to the cloud and pull backups back from the cloud archives.

We have used the predictive search functionality and hands down, it's the easiest way that I've ever recovered files. It's just like searching Google, but it searches your own files for recovery. It's easier than if you told somebody you could use a Google-like search to recover files, I don't think they would believe you until they've used Rubrik, because it does work that well. It's quick to search, no matter if you're searching a VM or even a physical box, it works across them.

With their new global file search in the latest version of their CDM, you don't even have to know what host that file was on. You can just type in a file name or a part of the file name and it'll find it. When a user comes and says, "We lost the file and it was called something like this," with any other solution, I don't know how you would find it. I think it would take a lot of work. With Rubrik, within a few seconds, you have file results. It's a pretty great feature.

We would like to see more support for Hyper-V. They support Hyper-V and it works with our CloudOut, the cloud DR, but they seem to add features for VMware first and Hyper-V gets added second or sometimes several releases after the VMware feature comes out. Seeing more support for Hyper-V would be a plus.

We have been using Rubrik for about a year and a half.

This solution is very stable, dependable, and reliable. We've had it for a year and a half and nothing has ever happened with the appliance, or come up where we'd think differently.

Their updates have been really good and we've never had an issue after applying an update where something didn't work.

Knowing that Rubrik has built a robust platform, which is what we're dependent on, gives us peace of mind.

This solution is highly scalable. You can add nodes as needed and expand the environment. There are no limitations to it in terms of hardware or Rubrik's support.

In order to expand, you would have to purchase licensing. Depending on the company's budget, that could be a limiting factor. As long as you can afford the licensing, if you grow then Rubrik can grow with you.

There are three of us in the company who use the product from a management standpoint. I am the system administrator, the CIO has access, and then the support tech has access to the system. I am responsible for maintaining it.

It is integrated 100% within our organization. We have no plans to do anything more with it because it's being used in every aspect of the business for backup and protection. We're fully invested and committed to it.

The vendor has world-class support, and some of the best support we have for our solutions. Rubrik support has been great to work with when we do have to work with them, which isn't often.

Prior to Rubrik, we were using the Unitrends solution for our backup. We switched because we couldn't depend on the Unitrends product. It was missing backups, for example. There were some times where every day, every week, five days a week, we'd spend a couple of hours a day, or maybe an hour a day, in Unitrends trying to get backups to run because they would miss a whole set of SQL servers or miss VMs.

We also couldn't do cloud archiving with it. It just wasn't capable of that.

I think we had outgrown the Unitrends solution. I think Unitrends is great for a small company, but anything small to medium and larger, Unitrends just isn't a good solution.

It seems like a very traditional backup solution. It's not forward-thinking and innovative and new like Rubrik is. So, we just knew that we needed something that we could depend on because, with Unitrends, we knew that if there was a disaster, we couldn't recover and so that's why we started looking at something else. We were very happy when we found Rubrik. It restored the peace of mind that we didn't have with Unitrends.

The initial setup is straightforward. Rubrik sends out a technical engineer when you get the appliance to help you get it online. Within a couple of hours of them being on-site, we were backing up data locally, as well as to the cloud. By the time they left, we had tested restores and our environment was backing up locally and into the cloud.

We did not have an implementation strategy and just followed Rubrik's guidance on how to implement it. They had a plan that was based on information that we provided them about our environment. That way, when they were on-site, we maximized our time with them to get it deployed. We really just trusted Rubrik with it.

There were two people from our company and one person from Rubrik involved with the deployment. I was on the technical implementation side, and our CIO was involved in the purchasing, decision-making, and ultimate sign-off on the solution.

The deployment was handled by Rubrik's technical support engineer, who is assigned to you during the sales process. They are somebody local, in fact. They are based in Iowa where we are.

You work with them through the whole sales process and then they help you get the appliance set up and then they're even your contact even after it gets set up. This means that if you ever have questions or you need assistance, they're the person to help and they're very knowledgeable. Our engineer was able to answer any questions we had.

In the sense that we're not spending IT resources on managing the solution, that's really been the return on investment.

Rubrik is definitely a premium solution, but if you can afford it and put it in your budget, they're definitely the way to go. They're not the cheapest solution on the block and I don't think they would tell you that they are. You pay a premium for Rubrik, but you're getting a premium service that comes with immutable backups, instant recovery, and world-class support. It's well worth the investment into Rubrik.

In the subscription, they have an appliance renewal program, and the maintenance is set up so that you know, upfront, what the potential increase is. They give you a range.

Before choosing Rubrik, we evaluated other solutions including Dell Avamar, which is their data protection solution. We also looked at Cohesity and with respect to Unitrends, we knew that they were out, so we didn't re-evaluate the product.

The results of our evaluation showed that Rubrik really outperformed the others, with just their support of Hyper-V. They all seem to support Hyper-V to some extent, but Rubrik seemed to have the best support for it at the time.

The speed of Rubrik and the ease of use also stood out, compared to the others.

The Dell solution was very much a traditional backup system and we wanted to get away from that. We wanted to go to something that was cloud-ready for archive and DR. We also wanted a product with great support for virtual machines because that's where our infrastructure was going. We just didn't get that feeling with the Dell solution. I'm sure that it is a great product and they probably sell a lot of it, but it wasn't the new solution we were looking for.

Then with Cohesity, we just didn't see it as a good fit. Overall, Rubrik just looked better and fit our needs better. We had to consider the infrastructure and the workloads we were protecting, as well as the features that we were looking for in terms of the easy backup and the immutable backup protection for ransomware, the CloudOut, and cloud DR technology. It all just was a little bit better in Rubrik and just beat out Cohesity.

We are heavily virtualized and have lots of SQL as well, which is why we picked Rubrik. These are two things that they are very good at.

They're definitely a forward-thinking and future-thinking company in terms of offering their VM backup and their SQL backup, so they really shine over the competitors we looked at.

Although the updates are really good, we are a little bit behind for some compliance reasons. However, we have access to all their features and we try to stay as current as possible. We're on almost the latest version.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it's a world-class solution. If you want peace of mind at night, immutable backups, cloud-native support, cloud DR support, all within a single solution with world-class technical support, Rubrik is the way to go. If you can afford it, you're getting the best. You're getting a premium solution and everything that they say they can do, they can do. They can prove it to you or customers can prove it. They've never oversold on what they can offer.

My biggest takeaway is that it's a good investment in your backups. It's not the cheapest solution, but the investment you're making protects your business and ensures that if you ever need your backups, they're going to work. You can trust Rubrik.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We came from two different systems. We had one product that was for our campus side and a different product for the hospital side. We wanted to bring those together and not have too many products in one environment. Rubrik covers everything in our VMware, for both campus and hospital. It does all of our backups. Anything that gets backed up for either side now goes through it.

We were siloed out into many different teams on both sides and we had a backup team on campus and a backup team on the hospital side. When those were brought together, the backup teams were dissolved and they were put into the VMware side where they're now managing hardware and server hardware refreshes.

My team is now the storage and backup team and we've taken on that task. Backups are offered as part of pretty much any ticket requesting a new server, for campus or hospital, that is a request for a new server. We spin up the backup at the server creation.

Our Rubrik is all on-prem. We back up our VMware environment and we also do a few physicals. We do some SQL and we do some Oracle.

It depends on what we're recovering, but some recoveries, before Rubrik, would take 30 minutes-plus. Now, similar recoveries that we've done have taken only seconds.

Also, when we first put this into place, we were actually moving to a hybrid cloud approach as well. We were trying to offer server creation as a simple ticket. We were doing this through offering the products, the catalog, and the automation behind everything to spin up the servers and deal out the storage. The two products that we actually have in our environment weren't very friendly with that automation piece but Rubrik, with its SLA policies, makes it very easy for us to say, "Hey, if this is a tier-zero application, we want this SLA applied globally," although there aren't very many of those in our environment. And if it's a tier-one application we can say, "Oh, we want this SLA applied." It does a very good job of keeping things clean in our environment. We also went through making sure we have everything tagged in VMware so that Rubrik can just pull that tag and apply that SLA. So things work pretty smoothly with all of that together.

We use the archival functionality. We tend to keep things on a Brik for a certain amount of time and, of course, it's a larger amount of time for tier-zero applications. And then we archive off to a private cloud that we have here at the university. That definitely keeps costs down because we have a deep and cheap storage solution for that cloud, Hitachi Content Platform. That was one of the main reasons that we went with Rubrik, as well, as it is compatible with HCP. We have quite a few petabytes of that and we wanted to make sure that we could leverage that and use it to our advantage.

Another benefit has been that management time has gone down significantly. Before, we had those two teams, one team for NetBackup and one team for Commvault. Each of those teams had two people on them. Now, we have one person on the storage team who is dedicated pretty much to backups, and the rest of us jump in as needed. We've really been able to consolidate that effort, and since it's an easy to use interface, we were able to pick up and run with that as a storage team. But with NetBackup before, we did have to build out quite a few servers and other stuff to get it into HCP. The whole model behind that, having lots of media servers, was very costly when you add in all of the hardware costs, licensing, et cetera. With this, it's quite a bit cheaper.

And Rubrik has definitely reduced downtime, because if we can spin up a recovery faster to that local CPU and the storage of Rubrik and have it up instantly, we can definitely get back to work sooner.

We do like the instant recovery because, beforehand, we would tell people, "Hey, it's going to take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to spin this up and, in that time, we're going to need your help with certain questions." We would sit there and work with them, but it always took quite a while. Now, we say, "Okay, give me 15 seconds and I can get this back up for you." And within that 15 seconds it's on and the only thing that we have to do afterwards is vMotion it off of the Rubrik storage back to where it should rest.

We also like the web interface. We mainly log in to the node and work from that, but occasionally we will log in and look at things when offsite. It's very intuitive and it works really well.

In addition, the solution's APIs play in with our automation piece for hybrid cloud. We wanted everything to work without manual interaction. We wanted everything to just play through when a ticket is submitted and automatically spin up the backup that we wanted, based on the tag in the VMware object. Our VMware team was the one that mainly looked at those APIs and built all of that out, but they haven't had any issues with it. It's worked exactly as designed.

The interface is still slightly clunky and has room for improvement. They do work with us whenever we mention anything that needs to be done or anything that we want. We find that bringing up the management interface is a little slow and not as intuitive as we would like, but it's been getting better as it evolves.

Rubrik is a somewhat new company, so it needs to become a little more established, and that just comes with time. It's not really too much of a concern or a weakness. It's just something that hasn't happened yet.

We've been using Rubrik for about a year and a half to two years now.

The stability has been good. We don't run into a ton of issues on it.

The scalability is wonderful. That is one of our biggest advantages with this. We can scale out as big or as small as we need to. We went with 20 nodes or so at the start and we've got over 40 now. We continue to expand as needed. We're still not all the way done with rolling this out to replace everything, but every year we're getting more and more nodes in there and replacing more and more.

We've covered about 85 percent of our environment. With the other 15 percent, it wasn't that Rubrik couldn't handle it, it's that the budget only allows for so many nodes to be purchased at a time. On top of that, we need to make sure that we do it in a way that's non-disruptive for work, and there are some teams that would be affected by disruption. We need to go a little bit at a time, which is what we've done. 

For the future, I do see us using it more. We have been doing a soft launch on Oracle, because we needed the tool that Rubrik has that allows for integration. That was still in something of an early stage of development, and we weren't comfortable putting it into production until it was in a more developed state. So we have used Rubrik to back up Oracle, but we've gone about using less of the automation pieces that Rubrik offers, and we're using it more as just a landing spot until that is fully developed. That's about the only piece that we're going to use more in the future.

When we have run into issues, we've reached out to our support team at Rubrik and they've been very quick to respond. Whether they're in the office or not, they do take our calls and help us out. It's always a quick response.

They're a newer company, so I'm sure they're still establishing their place, but the escalation teams and everybody that we've worked with have been capable and they've been able to fix our problems without having to bring in too many people.

We had Commvault and NetBackup before. Both of those were based on costly consumption-based licenses, and our CIO really disliked that model. The licenses that we had had been increasing in cost year after year and it just wasn't feasible to keep two separate products that weren't a good fit for the automation piece, for hybrid cloud. And they were on a slightly more pricey model. So rather than going to one or the other, we went out to see if there was anything that made more sense at the time. And that's when we found Rubrik.

With Rubrik, we have an agreement where it isn't license-based, and we are able to add more Briks as needed and more clusters as needed. It makes it extremely easy to expand our backup environment as the need arises.

With the other models out there, you would buy one quota and then you would hit it and prices would change and other things would happen. They have you locked in, no matter what. It was basically a situation where you had to pay whatever price they said you had to pay. With Rubrik, it's been very nice to have all of the equipment in our own data center and to have a little bit more control. For example, if we think we're going to need this much next year, this is what the hardware cost is going to be, and we can pay for any additional capacity that we need. That's been really nice with Rubrik.

Setting up Rubrik was both a little bit straightforward and a little bit of complex. We had the team that sold us the product there with us during setup and we went to add in all of the nodes at the same time. That was something that even that team had thought we could do, and then they remembered, in the middle of adding all the nodes at the same time, that we needed to do it in groups. That does take time. We were putting in something like 16 or 20 nodes, and we had to do it four-at-a-time. We had already done the physical installation and all the cabling, and all that portion. But when we started to add in the nodes, we had to do four and then wait for it to finish on that, and then do another four and wait for it to finish on that.

I think that, with time, they may implement a system that cues them up and continues to add nodes as it can. But that seems to be a similar problem to what occurs with other products in the same category. We also have Cohesity in our environment, which we don't use as a backup product, we use it strictly as a NAS, and it suffers from that same issue.

Our Rubrik setup took a few days, between our getting network issues figured out on our side, getting all of the cable management figured out with our data center team, the physical installs, the configuration with the Rubrik partners, and then adding in those nodes four-at-a-time until we had them all in.

We could have done it with less staff but we did want to make sure that all of us were aware of how the implementation worked, so we brought in all five of our team, two Rubrik partners, and two of our reseller partners, as well.

For maintenance of Rubrik we require two to three people. One works on Rubrik pretty much all the time, and the other four of us just jump in as needed on little things here and there.

In terms of Rubrik users, in addition to the five of us who do administration, we've given out access to a few of our database groups, so far, where there are 10 to 15 people.

Our reseller was ASG at that time, now it's Sirius. Everything was fine with them. On the Rubrik side, we had an engineer and a sales engineer, and that worked really well.

With Rubrik, we have been able to allocate FTEs to the other areas. We could have eliminated them but we chose to reallocate them. As we've had people either retire or move on to something different, we've either not replaced some, or we've been able to replace some of them with lower-level staff, simply because of the ease of use of this product.

On the hospital side, the ROI is from the lower cost, less work to manage it, and the smaller footprint in the data center, which means less power and cooling.

The pricing and licensing of Rubrik is better than products that we've had in the past. It was quite a bit cheaper than Commvault and NetBackup.

We actually reached out with our VAR and we evaluated anybody that could use the HCP that we have for archive storage. There weren't too many on the market that could do that. Rubrik was really the only solid option that we had at the time, other than Commvault and NetBackup. We weren't too happy with the latter two because of how much they were costing at that time.

We did physical PoCs in our environment and we did have Cohesity and Rubrik side-by-side, as well as NetBackup and Commvault. We did PoCs for moving to public cloud as well, for some of these services. The PoC with Rubrik stood out. 

Make sure that you work with your support team that's going to support you after your purchase and make sure that you're able to work with them well, before you pull the trigger on it. We like to build partnerships. When we have those partnerships, we're able to really rely on them for a long time.

I am a fairly new entry into the backup field. Before, we had Commvault and NetBackup, and when they were showing us how to use those, and trying to teach us some of the terms in the backup world, it felt like backup was a very niche piece of IT, and that there was a lingo and a language behind it. It seemed that there were definite things that people had experienced before that were common among all backup products, and things that they were left wanting or hating. With this new product, Rubrik, we walked into it blind, not being backup admins, and it made a lot of sense to us. And when we did bring in a backup admin, they said it was quite different to anything that they had worked on previously, and that it made more sense and that it was just quite a bit easier to manage.

Rubrik is something that everybody can understand fairly easily, and when we have given others access to it, such as the database teams, and we've let them run with it and see what they can do, they've been able to implement it really well. They've been able to figure out how to implement the tool in exactly the way that they wanted, whereas before there may have been limitations.

We haven't used the ransomware recovery at this point. We've got some protection behind that, where they are locked down and require additional effort to delete and to change. We follow guidelines from our IT security team and Rubrik together. We just haven't seen a scenario yet where we've actually needed to use that.

We have used Rubrik's predictive search, although we don't use it too much right now. Mainly, the way that we've used it so far has been the traditional backup and restore, where we get tickets stating that a backup needs to be spun up and it's done automatically. Then, when somebody comes back later on and says, "Hey, we need this item restored," we're able to call them up and restore it with them on the phone, within a matter of minutes. We haven't really had to use the file search too much or a lot of the tools that they have available for us, just because the need hasn't been there yet.

When it comes to recovery, we usually spin it up and turn it over to the team that asked us to recover that data. The information and identity access management team had to spin one up recently. They said that they had a bad patch and wanted us to spin back to that morning. We did that, and it had lost some of the network settings and some of that stuff that they were used to getting. We spent about 15 to 30 minutes with them and everything was back exactly the way that it should be. But that was pretty much exactly the same with other products that we had so it wasn't something new for us.