Rubrik Reviews

We've got three main use cases. The most common one now is ransomware protection, specifically one-touch recovery. If a customer is affected by ransomware, they can easily recover just the affected files with Rubrik, without having to do a full data backup recovery. 

Rubrik has built-in intelligence to know what's been affected, allowing for quick recovery and minimal downtime.

The second use case is for cloud migrations. You can back up your data on-prem and then restore it to another location, streamlining your migrations. It is a clever way of using backups. 

There's no need for human intervention to kick off the automation if you create workflows in Rubrik that can be followed in the event of a backup or compromise. For example, you can define backup policies and retention policies.

You can automate tiering. If something is older than, like, 90 days on the backup, it can automatically move to cheaper disk. That's another key feature of the automation process. Rubrik does a lot of incremental backups, eliminating the need for those manual large backups all the time.

The main reason our customers are buying Rubrik is the automated intelligent data management. It analyzes storage usage and automatically optimizes compression, data location, and deduplication. This part of the automation process is very valuable because it eliminates the need for a human to manually optimize storage.

The automation of policies is powerful. It automates the backup and recovery process, reducing manual human errors. 

Also, it's a single platform for managing backup, replication, and recovery, eliminating the need for different products. The one-touch recovery reduces downtime and accelerates business continuity. 

Additionally, people really like the global search, which allows for granular recoveries. Regarding security, Rubrik is immutable by default. Many other backup technologies rely on the storage they live on to be immutable, which can be a problem if someone gains access and turns it off. Rubrik's immutability is by default. 

There is room for improvement in the cost. Make it cheaper. Everyone knows what you're getting with Rubrik. It's expensive for a reason, but it is one of the better ones. 

Sometimes, when we talk to customers, we explain the amazing features, cost savings, and efficiencies. But when we give them the price, the people in procurement who don't understand the technology just look at the price and want it lower. 

I try to explain that it's saving them money and paying for itself. If something happens and the company can't work for a week, they'll lose millions. Then, they're complaining about a few hundred thousand pounds. This avoids brand reputation damage too. If you get caught in the news saying you've had ransomware, it could affect your company.

In future releases, Rubril could open up more SaaS protection for products like Salesforce or ServiceNow. I know Rubrik is doing something with SAP, but there's competition in that space.

I started in 2014, so it's been almost ten years.  

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. It is very stable.

It's very scalable, which was the reason it was invented because traditional backup wasn't scalable.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

We work with companies of all sizes, from 750 end users to 10,000 users. 

We've been working with Rubrik for many years. For now, we have between 20 and 50 customers.

The times I've worked with them, the customer service and support were just a little bit slow, but they're still very clever.

So, the customer service and support could be a bit faster. 

Positive

Commvault, Veritas, and Zerto are the main ones. As a reseller, we work with a lot of competitive products, including Veeam and Rubrik. Lately, there have been opportunities for both. 

However, customers are often already using one or the other, so it is difficult to switch them to Veritas.

The competitive edge lies in terms of the automation. Traditional backup solutions, like Veritas, involve a lot of manual processes. Rubrik's automation overcomes many of the manual issues and testing challenges.

Security and compliance is another area. Rubrik's reporting and analytics help overcome challenges related to backup reporting, especially for compliance with regulations like GDPR.

Rapid recovery is a big challenge. Rubrik's One-Touch Recovery helps address this. Using backup as a migration tool can also help overcome challenges when moving to a hybrid cloud.

Finally, storage management. Customers buy a lot of storage, and it's hard to manage efficiently. Rubrik's intelligent data management platform can help overcome this challenge.

The deployment is actually very straightforward, probably one of the easiest data protection platforms to roll out. They've really reinvented the way backup is done. The founders came out of Google, the guys who made Rubrik.

Deployment model:

It's primarily on-prem, but recently, people have been interested in the cloud protection module.

Deployment time:

Rubrik is easy to deploy, you should be up and running within a few weeks after testing. So, it can start from a few days to a couple of weeks.

For a small company, the deployment could be just a few days. For a bigger customer, it could be a couple of weeks, depending on their requirements. But you can be up and running quickly, then it's just a matter of configuring it to their specific needs.

We work in the resell division, so get measured on selling licenses, but the rest of Accenture is measured on professional services. They would handle the implementation, support, troubleshooting, and upgrading.

Accenture has 750,000 people divided into client teams. Each client has a group of sales or technical teams, and the technical teams are divided into security, infrastructure, compliance, and risk. It's difficult to say how many are in the technical teams, but each client has one, and we have 250 key clients around the world. So, tens of thousands of people.

The main benefit is cost savings. Rubrik is expensive, but due to its data management capabilities, customers can save a lot by reducing hardware and storage. The automation features also reduce manual labor from the operations team. 

One-touch recovery reduces lost revenue by recovering quicker. Automation improves staff productivity and reduces costly human error. So, overall, there's reduced risk, no business disruption, and a faster time to value because it's easy to implement, and much of it is automated.

It is a more expensive solution, but people need to know what they're paying for. On a scale of one to ten, where one is extremely expensive, and ten is very cheap, I would rate it a four.

Overall, I would rate the product I a ten out of ten. I love the product! 

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 use Rubrik for VM backups, NAS backups, and SQL backups. Most of what we protect is virtual. It's AHV and VMware, primarily. We have a half dozen physical machines, but most of it is virtualized. We don't do any cloud-native protection yet, although we're about to start doing Office 365.

We have the Brik as an on-prem piece and we offload all our data to Azure.

Not having to specify a time to run a backup with a fixed schedule is something that's really beneficial. In the past we had to schedule and try to manually stagger things over the window, to back up everything. Because Rubrik is SLA-based, you say, "Well, I need it to fit in this window here," and it just backs it up when it's most convenient for the Brik and for the third-party system. It looks at the CPU usage and says, "Okay, it's not as busy now. I know I've got time to take the backup." That's a real advantage.

When it comes to its archival functionality, automatic is probably the best way to do it. You set it up in the SLA to archive the data, and tell it where to put it, and it just does it. You don't have to worry about it. You don't have to check it. It just works. That's true with a lot of Rubrik's functionality. The big thing, the big benefit, it gives us is that it just works. We don't have to handhold it or check it to make sure things are still working. It does just work.

Another way it has improved our organization is recovery time. In the past, when we wanted to recover one of our SQL databases—our student record system is about 1.5 TB in size—to recover that from tape used to take about four or five days, and then get it onto a disk and have it visible in SQL Server. With Rubrik, when we've had to recover that, we've actually put it into the Live Mount capability. It runs on the Brik in the SSD layer. When we timed this, it took nine seconds to mount it so it was available in SQL Server and, within 30 seconds, it was out-performing production on queries. So within a minute you can have recovered what you might need to recover, rather than having to wait days to recover something. And if you have to completely replace the database, then you can migrate that over. Or if you have to just take some data out, you can just pull that out as well. It's an instant approach to database management, rather than having to worry about the time it takes to get data out.

And when we've had to recover a backup of SQL data, it has reduced downtime. It's allowed us to get back up and running within 10 or 15 minutes, rather than having to wait days to recover something, especially where the state needed to be adjusted as well. The impact, the downtime, is much reduced now.

When it comes to backup testing, we don't have to worry about validating that the backup has run. We can spin up a backup into Live Mount. We run our DBCC checks for SQL against the Live Mount instead of production. That helps protect the production platform performance, but it also allows us to validate that our backups are smooth and are recoverable as well. Having a backup is one thing, but proving that you can restore them has always been a bit tougher. So we pick databases on a weekly basis and recover those with Live Mounts to make sure that we can access the data in them.

We also don't spend time managing backups now. That's the really important message. We used to have about half an FTE looking after our backup state, making sure jobs were running, or actually changing their tapes on a daily basis. That's all gone away now. If anything, it might be 0.1 FTE, just to just keep an eye on things occasionally. Some weeks there might be two days of stuff we might need to do, whether it's for upgrade prep and then doing an upgrade, or adding some new bits to the backup piece, or removing things as we decommission them. But it's more operational now, rather than actually managing the backup piece itself. It's just another part of the process. Part of the business case for us was the time it was going to save us in managing the backup, to add more value back into the organization.

Rubrik has given us that half an FTE back. We don't have to worry now about what the backups are doing. We can actually now focus on other things. As a result, our IT security posture has improved because we've realigned that resource to improve our IT security resource count. We're now being more proactive with our security stances. We are able to use our resources more efficiently.

The Polaris, SaaS-based framework for extracting metadata is what the ransomware product actually is surfacing. You have the core Polaris product which is the GPS, and then Radar is actually in that. We do have Sonar as well, which is the data classification product search, to look for data that shouldn't be in certain places. The benefit of Polaris is that I don't have to be onsite to look at that. I can log in remotely. It allows me to have visibility of what we're doing in terms of our backups. That's particularly true if we have a ransomware alert that is triggered in the early hours. When I wake up I can have a look at that alert through the Polaris interface, rather than having to log in to my laptop and onto the VPN to get into the CDM product. Polaris is really helpful in giving us the agility.

The Sonar piece really helps because it allows us to look for data that shouldn't be in certain places, and it even helps the efficiency of platforms. For example, when our HR product creates the payroll, it actually creates a copy of that temporarily on the HR platform. When it's processed, it should be deleted or moved into archive. But when we ran Sonar against the HR platform, we actually identified that a lot of the data hadn't been tidied up as part of that process. So if that server had been compromised by either internal or external access, it would have potentially allowed a lot of that sensitive data to be leaked out. It's helped them to change their processes to look after the data better.

It backs up everything to Azure, so we no longer have to worry about tapes. When we went into lockdown, as a response to COVID, we didn't have to think about, "Well, we need to send people into the site to change backup tapes." That all carried on working. We could do a lot more remotely than we would have been able to do otherwise.

We also have the Radar product for ransomware detection. That looks for anomalies in our backups and will trigger an alert if it sees something that is an abnormal amount of change. That could be lots of deletes or modifications, compared to normal. Or it could be some VMs that have suddenly had a lot of folders added or deleted. We haven't had anything so far, at least, that was problematic, but it's nice to know that it's keeping an eye on how much change is happening with backups and helping us identify problems. It can detect when someone has gone in and deleted a substantial amount of data on a VM. If that's abnormal it will flag it and say, "Well, you might want to investigate this." 

Our finance was doing a big refresh of non-production data. They deleted a load of log data and the app flagged it and said, "Well, this is strange activity. You might want to just check this out." I referred that to the finance team and they said, "Yeah, we're just refreshing the VMs, that's okay." That was cool, because we moved on. But if they had said, "Well, no one has touched that for months," then we would have looked at it in a bit more detail to see what it could have been. But without that alert, we wouldn't have any clue that anything happened. It's helping us keep an eye on what's normal and not on the estate. It's worth it because it doesn't always have to be external actors that are causing problems. You could have somebody internal being malicious if they're looking to leave or dissatisfied in their role, for example. It helps keep an eye on those situations as well.

Its web interface is really easy to use. It's just click and go. It's fast and intuitive. We've never had any problems in navigating.

Looking at how the data is broken down, we can see the total story, but sometimes it's difficult to see how big a particular snapshot is. Across 90 days of snapshots, which one is a particularly large one? Looking at the data holistically could be a lot easier. 

With the Radar product, it would be helpful if it gave us a bit more insight into the alerts. It might be alerting on an object like this VM, but what particularly on that? A bit more oversight, without having to do digging, is the biggest gap they should be filling now.

I've been using Rubrik for nearly three years now.

It hasn't gone down yet. Even when we've had a power problem, and the Brik actually lost power because our UPS is failing, we turned it back on and it just picked up where it left off and carried on. It does just work and it's intelligent enough to rebalance itself as well.

Because it's hyper-converged, we can just add additional Briks and nodes to give extra capability. We introduced an edge appliance to our setup. We installed it, added it to the cluster, and it picked up some of the workloads. It was so simple, a bit like Nutanix. The fact that it is all hyper-converged means the whole scaling piece is so much simpler compared to 3D architecture. It's just plug and go.

It's only within our IT department that there is access to the product. There are about a dozen people who can use it. But the services that we support help support the whole organization, whether it's HR, finance, or research data, or user file stores. It does touch everyone.

Prior to using Rubrik we used NetBackup onto tape, and we used a bit of StorSimple as well. It used to take us six days and 23 hours to back up on those, as a full. We only had just just enough time in a week to fit it all in and then we had a very small window to change the tapes and start it off again. That was an ongoing problem we'd always had so it needed very close monitoring. If backup jobs failed it was always hard to work out why. And we had the whole tape-changing piece as well. In addition, StorSimple was quite expensive. 

Rubrik reduced our backup costs and our backup time. It increased our snapshot position as well, because we're doing incremental forever. It just made the whole process so much more efficient.

The initial setup was really straightforward. From unboxed to being in production it took less than two hours. That was with some of the networking we had to do around it as well. 

But we did go a bit too fast in terms of deployment. Even though it's incremental forever, it has to do that first full backup. We pointed a little bit too much at it the first time around and it struggled to ingest it all and move forward. After 24 hours, we stopped and started again because we were still backing up through the old method as well. When we started again we slowed the pace down to happen over three or four days rather than one day. At that point we had ingested everything and, from there, it's been smooth sailing. We haven't had any problems. 

The biggest thing I always say, if anyone asks, "What would you do differently?" is to slow down the initial rollout to make sure that you're not overloading the first full backups. The incremental forever won't be in position as quickly, but it will be a bit more stable.

I was the only one involved in the deployment. My platform team handles maintenance of it. I've got a junior infrastructure engineer who essentially looks after it. Her role is to look after monitoring and backups. But it's not something we ever really have to look at these days.

Our ROI is actually neutral because we're backing up more. We could never back up everything we needed to back up, and that was always a risk that we carried. While the return is neutral, we are doing a lot more than we could before.

We looked at Veeam, but I didn't want to have a large on-premise implementation, as that is very much an appliance model. I would have had to roll out quite a lot of infrastructure to cover that.

We looked at Druva, to see where that was in the market but that didn't really fit our model.

We looked at Cohesity as well, and they seemed to be a few months behind Rubrik, and just duplicating everything Rubrik were doing.

The main requirement we did have was that it had to post to AHV as well. Three years ago, there were not many products out there that could backup VMware and AHV.

We haven't explored the API yet. It's been on our list for quite a while, but it's always been hard to prioritize. We have so much technical debt that we've been dealing with, rather than focusing there. As an API-first product, it makes a lot of sense to go that way. For us, it's just a matter of prioritizing that. I have had a little play with the API interface, to prove we can get some information we want to get out of it.

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).

We have been mainly using Rubrik's backup and recovery solution for our microservice-based products, which we have for different trading applications. We have a trading application, where the customer makes use of any workflow through the GUI of the trading application. The request goes through our microservices server REST API. These microservices server REST APIs are sometimes using DynamoDB as a database solution.

Our applications are quite scalable and user-friendly. We wanted our database solution to be highly scalable. Since all the trades being carried out between customers are highly secure in nature and carry sensitive data, we wanted this in case there was some type of application crash due to a timeout or downtime. Our database should not crash and the data should not be lost. For that purpose, we needed to use Rubrik's backup and recovery solution. So, on a weekly basis, we take regular snapshots of our databases via Rubrik's solution in case of any downtime, especially during the week from Monday to Friday when trading is being done at a high peak level. At that time, we take snapshots. In case there are any issues, then we will simply roll back our database to the previous snapshot which we had captured.

We are protecting VMs. They are all virtual.

It has reduced our maintenance efforts. The amount of time and effort that would have gone in troubleshooting various issues related to a data crash has been addressed by Rubrik. So, it has helped to improve our productivity. The data is being captured about our customers periodically that is secure and safe.

Our entire team uses the Grafana application to monitor the response time of various API that we have in the application. Because we can restore our application to its normal state, gradually the graph of the downtime comes down for APIs. For Grafana plotting, we are using different error codes. We see in graph form if there are any spikes in the error code, for how long those spikes remain, and how much time it took for the spikes to go down their normal level.

From a security point of view, data is highly-encrypted using the Rubrik security solution. Therefore, we don't have to worry about any image/data loss or data leakage.

If there is any corruption of the snapshot, e.g., the target is corrupted while taking the snapshot, Rubrik is our faster option to have two snapshots: snapshot one and snapshot two. If there is some issue with snapshot two, then we still have the option to restore the data to snapshot one. In this way, we never lose the customer's trade data.

Rubrik's web interface is very user friendly and easy to use with all its navigation, e.g., it is easy to identify if you're looking for any help. So, the help features are there. The customer support feature is very nice. We are regularly using that. The alignment of all the fields of the platforms on the Rubrik GUI are very good.

Its archival functionality is very nice. On a regular basis, we snapshot our VMs and server logs. So, we keep archiving the logs and snapshots into Rubrik for archival functionality on a monthly basis. For 30 days, we maintain the snapshots of our data using the Rubrik archival functionality. Whenever we need to retrieve any snapshots that have been stored for the past one month, we can easily retrieve them. The retrieval process is also very fast from the archival function, and it doesn't take too much time.

We have been using Rubrik for around three years.

In my experience of using Rubrik, once or twice it didn't work and the issue was resolved quickly. Otherwise, it is quite stable.

My colleague, my assistant, and I manage it.

It is highly scalable. We can easily add more VMs to our configurations or Rubrik account. It also can easily take snapshots.

In-house users are around 25 to 30 people who are mostly from the DevOps profile: software engineers, the infrastructure team and release managers. Developers are also involved.

We have received excellent customer support from Rubrik when addressing any of our queries, from time to time.

The technical support is very good. They are quite well-versed with the Rubrik solution, so they provide quick solutions to our queries.

We were not previously using another solution.

We learned third-party backup and recovery solutions can be good enough to handle and exhaust all our requirements. Instead of starting to build a backup recovery solution from scratch, we explored outside our organization. Now, third-party vendors are very good and intelligent data recovery solutions are available.

The initial setup was between an easy to medium difficulty level. To install the Rubrik application, we created an account, then specified the contribution of our VMs. The microservices took the most amount of time during the setup part. Later on, defining the duration and frequency at which we want the snapshots to be taken was easy. 

The setup took three to four days.

A colleague and I deployed it. Whatever we couldn't do, we directly contacted Rubrik for that.

Due to this effective, faster backup and recovery solution, we are now able to focus on other creative tasks to meet our entire pipeline. So, we have seen ROI in terms of the improvement of productivity in our team. We save around one million dollars a year.

The solution has saved us 25 to 35 percent of our time.

The maintenance has been very quick and fast to retrieve our snapshot from the archival functionality. If you had to source for any data research query, then that used to take around one hour for one terabyte of data. Now, that has been reduced to 20 to 25 minutes. It takes less time for us to restore data as well as reduces recovery time. 

The downtime has been reduced. Downtime used to be around five to six hours. Now, it has been reduced to three to four hours. This reduction happened after two or three weeks.

The licensing cost is quite high. That is something that needs to be worked out, because so many times it happens that the team does not have the budget or there are other issues at that time. Cost has become an important factor in deciding whether to continue with the Rubrik solution.

The maintenance cost is low.

We also initially evaluated Cisco, Dell EMC, and Nutanix and found the Rubrik solution to be the most effective for our requirements. Almost all these solutions were equal. With the other vendors, the main problem was the customer support when we initially gauged those vendors, e.g., to get hands-on training to get a demo, then later on to follow up with their teams, the entire process wasn't smooth. However, with Rubrik, we didn't see this problem.

We are considering migrating our microservice stack from a VM-based solution to Docker-based solution. So, we are considering a Docker integration with Rubrik for the communication of our microservices with ModAPI of our solution. For that, we probably need a handshaking mechanism. For that purpose, we are considering the Rubrik security REST APIs.

I would strongly recommend trying the Rubrik solution. Their solution is stable, scalable, and intelligent. It has cloud solutions for our backup and security needs.

We are not using the SLA-based policy automation feature of Rubrik. We might look at this in the future. Now, we have our own separate SLA-based automation tool.

We are using Polaris, but there is another team at my organization who handles governance and compliance.

They are in touch with our team to understand our entire integration, setup, architecture, how things have been done, and how Rubrik is helping us. The plan in the future is that certain teams will start using Rubrik in their application.

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

This project initially started out as a replacement for our legacy backup system, IBM Tivoli, which was backing up our VMware environment. Since our environment is almost entirely virtualized, protecting those assets was the primary goal. We also knew that we wanted to get to a state where our backups were protected against ransomware via immutability or air gapped backups, which we've now accomplished with Rubrik.

Shortly after the initial deployment, we realized the full capabilities of Rubrik. We are utilizing Rubrik's backup integration with Oracle databases and SQL databases. There are several other business critical applications, like Tableau, that are also being protected via  Rubrik.

Due to Rubrik's ability to execute in protecting our on-premises assets in the data center, we decided to utilize Rubrik's Office 365 and AWS Cloud Native solution to protect our data in the cloud.

The SLA-based policy automation has streamlined our data protection operations. We have moved away from backup windows and moved to letting the SLA policy actually determine when is the most efficient time to do backups. We apply the SLA based on business rules to certain artifacts or entities within our environment and let Rubrik run with it. It has been extremely efficient and has cut down on the operational overhead of managing backups.

In addition, we have absolutely seen a reduction in the time we spend on recovery testing. We have automated the validation of backups for our tier-one assets using Rubrik's API.

We're seeing about a 62 percent TCO savings and 90 percent management time savings since switching to this solution. And we've reduced the data center footprint, which comes with operational overhead, by 75 percent since switching from Tivoli.

Since acquiring Rubrik's Polaris GPS offering, we have further increased our productivity by utilizing SLA policies that extend across clouds and multiple on-premises data centers.

It's hard to specify a feature that is most valuable. The overall architecture is where we find the most value. Having an API-centric approach has allowed us to utilize a lot of automation to trigger the capabilities of Rubrik. This helps us minimize the operational overhead of managing and restoring backups. We have integrated Rubrik with our ticketing system and have some custom triggers to present Dev/Test environments from Rubrik to our development team.

The web interface is extremely intuitive and, with recent changes to the API, it has become more responsive than it was when we initially implemented the product two years ago.

We love the archival functionality and we utilize it a lot. We archive out to Azure Blob Storage to have an additional layer of protection and extend SLA times.

From an information security and business continuity perspective, the solution’s ability to recover from a breach, is one of the biggest features of the product. We don't have to worry about the operational complexity of air-gapped backups and can rely more on the immutability approach. It is a highly valued feature in this solution.

At the time of this review, Rubrik is still missing several components to their Office 365 backup offering. These ideas have been voiced to Rubrik and their product management team.

It's been our experience that when our ideas are surfaced to Rubrik, we are brought into a feedback session with Rubrik's product team. We now view Rubrik as a partner in our business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.

We've been a customer for 4 years.

The stability of the Rubrik solution has been extremely solid. In the 2 years we've owned the solution, we've had no downtime because of hardware or software failures.

The ability to just attach additional bricks to scale-out capacity is great!

Rubrik's tech support is amazing, which is yet another differentiator with this solution.

Before Rubrik we used IBM Tivoli; however, we could never get Tivoli successfully tied into VMware. Tivoli's snapshot technology was a continual failure, and even with the support of IBM, we could not get it working without it causing infrastructure issues to our VMs. This left us in a state where we had no confidence in the ability of the product to actually execute backups or restores.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward. The install took place one afternoon and included an upgrade. Within three hours we had our VMware environment tied in, SLAs configured, and we were prepared for the initial round of backups that were going to take place over a weekend. By Sunday morning, we had our entire infrastructure protected by Rubrik.

There were two people directly involved in the implementation, Rubrik's pre-sales engineer and one of my engineers.

We have 62 percent TCO savings.

Rubrik Go was not available when we initially acquired the solution; however, as we look to further investments in Rubrik, we plan on executing with their subscription model.

Outside of extending into the SaaS platform with Office 365 and Cloud Native offerings, there have been no additional costs.

We looked at Veeam and Cohesity. 

With Veeam, it seemed like they were stitching solutions together to provide the single platform. Also for several reasons, we did not want to write our backups to the same storage array as our production system. These two factors quickly eliminated Veeam.

Cohesity was positioning themselves not only as backup solution, but also as secondary storage offering. We quickly determined that Cohesity was not as intuitive or as simple in their backup approach, which eliminated them as one of the products we were considering.

We felt it was the best strategic decision going forward to choose Rubrik since their engineers were solely focused on solving backup and their solution was the simplest and most intuitive to manage.

The biggest lesson I've learned throughout our time using Rubrik is that the investment in simplicity, has proven to be extremely valuable.

Rubrik has been our main backup and disaster recovery solution for two campuses.

We are using the hardware appliance, rather than the virtual solution. The environments that we are protecting are 99% virtual and just a couple of physical systems.

The specific systems that we protect are SQL, Oracle, ERP, and our wireless controllers.

We used to have to dedicate a full-time employee just to look at and manage the backups. After implementing Rubrik, we no longer need a dedicated person. It's user-friendly to the point where anybody can just look at it and figure what's going on.

The time we spend on recovery testing has been improved by up to 50%. Similarly, we have saved time in managing our backups. The savings in time for managing our backups is up to 50%.

Using Rubrik has helped to reduce our downtime by up to 50%.

The simplicity of the SLA design is the most useful feature. You just set it and you don't need to come back to it again or worry about it.

The SLA-based policy administration has helped us to adjust the workflow, saving us time. This is because what we have right now is that we set up an SLA based on what the appliance does; for example, it might be an SQL server or an application server.

The web interface is user-friendly, clean, and it provides a good summary of what you're protecting at a glance. It also shows you whether there are jobs running, or not. It is my daily task to look at the web interface to monitor our status.

We use the archival functionality and it seems to work fine. We don't see a conflict with it.

The integration with EMC Isilon works well and it's a really great idea to have Rubrik take the snapshot not just on its end, but on the appliance end, and be able to retrieve it.

We used the predictive search functionality and find that it makes things easier to do. We save a lot of time in trying to figure out whether we need to download a file first, or whether we need to unarchive it.

The reporting, in particular the customization of reports, needs to be improved. It should be more user-friendly and a little bit easier to do. The reports should be less dull, as they are a little bit too technical for management.

When upgrading the software, the data on the node being upgraded should still be accessible from the other nodes.

We have been a Rubrik customer since 2017.

This product is very stable. Each time that we asked to do a backup job or a restore, it simply performs the command. We have not seen any compatibility issues.

There is no maintenance, except for security advisories that Rubrik recommends once in a while.

We have not seen any limitation in the amount of data that we are backing up. Between two locations, we are backing up approximately 40 terabytes.

The support from Rubrik is excellent. They do support tunnels on the back end, and you can simply email support and they will get an answer to you within that hour. Or, if you call, then someone will address your issue right away. 

Previously, we used to have Dell EMC Avamar and we were running into a problem where the backup jobs would conflict with each other. Now, Rubrik does that for us and fixes it. Not only that, but we're uploading to Azure as well. This means that we didn't have to worry about that part and how to configure it. It can be a complicated process, but the Rubrik software made it simpler to do and easy to manage.

This is one of the reasons that we switched to Rubrik.

We also have EMC Isilon, and the backup jobs were taking far too long to complete. It would take days and with Rubrik, there was a significant improvement. I would estimate a 40% cut in the time required to complete a backup.

I find the deployment process very straightforward. It was set up in just a few hours.

The process is basically to rack and stack, then assignment management and data VLAN to the Rubrik appliance.

Three of us were involved in the initial setup. There was me, a colleague of mine, and a Rubrik engineer. The engineer from Rubrik was very professional, insightful, and answered all of the questions that we had about the product.

As a technical person, I don't have the details, but from what I have heard, it can be expensive.

I did not personally evaluate other products but my colleague, who was handling the project, evaluated Veeam and Cohesity.

Rubrik is fully-equipped in the sense that it is a full-service backup appliance. You can search, restore, perform backups, and you can live-mount.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to look at what type of appliance you have and check the compatibility. Review case studies or testimonials from customers who have that appliance to get their feedback on it, and then do a demo.

What I have learned from using this product is that when the appliance does throw an error, it's not typically Rubrik's fault because they do the API calls. It's on the appliance end, so you have to keep it up to date. This is from both a firmware and software perspective.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it for backup and recovery; system protection is an even a better way to describe the use case. We not only have a backup of our data but it also provides disaster recovery. While having your data is important, having the ability to return to production, within minutes of an issue — which means standing up the whole VM at a point in time — is way more important in today's world than it is to just have a copy of your data.

It's protecting both physical and virtual environments. It protects Windows, Linux — multiple flavors — as well as Microsoft SQL and Oracle Databases. We have two bricks and we're protecting about 175 machines, both physical and virtual. It has been about 98 percent VMs, and probably even higher than that. We're a VM shop. 

We are protecting all of our SQL databases with the native SQL tools within Rubrik, through which we can do all of our table restores at a point in time, depending on the database itself. We are using multiple different archives with multiple different SLAs, both on-premise and to AWS.

Our deployment of the solution is primarily on-prem.

The SLA-based policy has had a positive effect on our data protection operations. I'm going to be going even deeper into the automation part, to use some of the newer features that have just come out in this release. It's going to be great to be able to just tag a machine in Virtual Center and its backups will be taken care of. That will help our process in terms of protecting machines that need to be protected and it will remove a step that people don't necessarily remember to do.

In the 5.0 release, they added the ability to back up Oracle Databases, natively, similar to how SQL servers are done, and that's going to be a big win for us. Hopefully it will reduce our storage size because we back up many databases that have a lot of the same data in them. Today we can only do it as a big blob so we don't get any space savings in that respect.

In terms of recovery time, it saves us days. The last time that we had a major system go belly-up, it was three or four days before we had the system back to being functional. In contrast, I was able to return a system that was being a pain due to some vendor-patching, multiple times, back to a known state, and within minutes. Granted, they weren't the same systems, but it would have been virtually the same thing if I had been able to do that with the major system that was down for days. Fortunately it doesn't happen that often, but in that particular patching case where I was using it, it felt like I did it about ten times. The vendor-patch was not going well, so I had to keep bringing it back multiple times, in a very short amount of time. But typically it has not been that much of an issue.

In addition, with the multi-tenancy feature that they added, back in one of the later 4-trains, we've been able to provide another team within our organization access to be able to manage their own backups, and only see their servers. They are able to only touch and change stuff for their owns systems. In theory, that also gives them the ability to do their own restarts if they ever need to. Our previous system had really no way to handle that, so it's been pretty fantastic.

Overall, I would say Rubrik has saved us a lot of time managing backups. I used to spend a minimum of about 50 percent of my time doing just nursing our backup system. Now, I might spend one percent of my time a week looking at the backups. There's not much that I need to do, other than just keep an eye on the system to make sure that nothing crazy has gone on. But I spend virtually no time, at this point, dealing with the backup system to make sure that it's still running. It's been a big help. Since I'm not spending as much time dealing with the backups or doing any sort of recovery, we have been able to actually work on other projects and other needs of the organization.

It has also helped to reduce downtime. We had one production server that went down and we were able to get it back up in just a couple minutes. In comparison, if we had needed to rebuild that entire server, that would have taken days, and possibly longer, due to needing to reload the applications. That is not, sometimes, a trivial matter.

The database backups, where you can go to a point in time, are huge.

The instant-on recovery is another huge bonus to the system. It lets you get a system back up and running within minutes if you need to, instead of having to try restoring it all out to your primary storage. That becomes a huge deal when you have a system that's down and people want it back up as soon as possible.

The archiving, off-of-box, is awesome. It lets you put your data where you want it and gives you the peace of mind of having more than one copy of it. And it's smart about the way that it does the archiving. It doesn't just copy one-for-one. It does all of its processing of the deduplication and compression before it sends it off to the archive, which helps with our cloud costs. Before, we weren't doing anything to the public clouds. But the amount of storage that we're actually storing in AWS is a lot smaller than what it would have been if we had just done a normal copy-out.

Rubrik's web interface is fantastic. I can get to it from pretty much any device. It's responsive, it's simple, it's clean, and it's easy to find stuff. One of our main goals when we picked the solution was that it would be something that was simple to use; that someone could do so without having to go to like a lot of training. In an emergency, if someone else needed to log in and figure out how to do something, they most likely could do it through the web interface. It's definitely user-friendly.

There are some improvements that could be made to the web portal itself to make life easier. It comes down to the usability, to being able to use the system wherever you are. While it's pretty user-friendly, there are little quirks to it that could easily be changed. 

Also, the deployment and configuration of the backup service is something that could be streamlined a little bit, particularly when you're trying to do a SQL workload. You have to install a backup service on the server. You only have to do it once and then you're done, but you have to do that on every server that you want to protect. We are backing up about 170 servers at the moment. There isn't an onerous number of tasks, but there are some things that you have to remember to do. And if you haven't done it at all, or not in a long time, you may or may not know to do them. I would think that, like in the installation wizard, they should be able to step you through that type of stuff, or at least give you a reminder. It's something simple but something that could be improved. 

It's been very stable. We've not had any issues with the system. It has performed well since day one and we're on our fourth or fifth different code line.

Scalability is pretty simple. We had initially started off with our two bricks in a replication pair, and then we needed to bring that replicated pair into the main system. I worked with support, decomm'ed the replication target, got that brick reset, and then brought it into the cluster. That took just a couple hours, but that included the fact that I had to physically move the box. But it was extremely simple and, once it was in, it operated just as you would have expected. All of the certificates copied over and I was able to contact all of the nodes exactly how I would've expected. It was pretty seamless.

Performance-wise, we might be using five or ten percent of the performance that's available through the system. After that initial ingest, you're only really copying changes, and most of our changes are relatively small in comparison to what the system can actually handle. 

In terms of features, we're only using five or ten percent of the features that are in the system. I was working on using some other features and then the need went away. It was taking a snapshot of a database and from one server and restoring it onto another server, but the need went away so I stopped working on that.

As new things come out, they move us forward. They just released a feature for the archives and cleaning them up. I must've missed it in one of the release notes, so when I ran across it I said to myself, "Oh, I better go in and enable this." Low and behold, it did exactly what we needed it to do and it saved us double digits of terabytes on our archive locations, which was great because we were running out of space. When they added the ability to link VM's between virtual centers, I enabled that one. As new features are released I'll implement them. There are quite a number of features, such as all of the integration with NetApp and Pure Storage, which I can't use because I don't have that storage. I can only use the features that make sense for us.

Tech support has been fantastic. They will bend over backward to help get solutions. The biggest thing that we use them for is to do the upgrades to the software. Since they have global support people, I'm not having to either patch a system in the middle of the day or having to change our backup windows. They have someone available after our backup window ends but before the beginning of our business day. It's not in the middle of the night for them either, they're coming in at their normal time. It's been great. Plus, on the human side, they're not forcing people to work a third shift to support us on the other side of the world. They give someone a normal shift and make the support experience positive.

We had been using ARCserve for about 18 years before we switched. Sometimes it's referred to as CA ARCserve and sometimes just ARCserve. It went through a couple of different incarnations. It got spun off at one point, so it's a hit or miss as to what it's known as.

We decided to switch because our system was way out of date, and in terms of performance, our backups were taking so long that we couldn't actually complete them. The restore time was abysmal. It took days to restore if we needed a large chunk of data. The maintenance of it, in terms of the human capital, was intense. As I said, I was using at least 50 percent of my time per week just trying to make sure that the backups completed, as much as they could, for that week. We were starting to run into the scale issue, where we couldn't back up our data and export it off to tape within any amount of time that was reasonable. 

We were also way out of space. One of the biggest management issues was that I had to keep moving stuff around. I had to arrange things such that, "That job has got to go over here because there's enough room for it. And this job has to go over here because there's enough room for that one." We did a project and we came across Rubrik and it was the best decision that we've made.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was the easiest setup that we had on all of the systems that we had looked at before we bought them. When we moved from our PoC to production, we actually handled the setup of the second brick when it came in. We didn't even need to engage their field engineers to help us.

There were two of us involved, me and a colleague who is the senior network engineer. The deployment took about four hours. We actually redeployed both of them, the whole system, within four hours. We tore up the old PoC stuff, refreshed it all, and then started over with it because some stuff had changed and we needed to restart it. We did the whole system within about four hours.

In terms of implementation strategy, we cut over from our old system as fast as we could. We started with our large and most important system. We let that sit there and bake and perform its initial backup. Once that was done, we started porting every machine over that we could. It was great with the way that the system worked. We just went through our list of systems that we needed to move. He started at the top and I started at the bottom and we just checked them off, made sure that we got them all in. We then stopped all of the legacy jobs on the previous system and we were up and running on the new system within less than a week.

The biggest ROI is a lot of hidden costs. With the lower amount of management time, I've been able to focus on doing a whole lot of other work. Nobody has done a full ROI comparison, but just in my time savings it's been huge. I've not needed to do a whole lot of work on the Rubrik system itself.

We pay yearly and it's based on the number of bricks. Each brick has a set cost, which I don't know off the top of my head. I don't handle the money side of things.

We have not had any other cost from them since we did the initial purchase. The only other thing that I know you can even buy are some of the connectors to the cloud: cloud-on and cloud-out. But we're currently not using them.

Our project started off with eight vendors. We whittled it down and PoC'ed four of them and ultimately chose Rubrik.

The ones we focused on were a Veeam/ExaGrid combo, and Cohesity was another one. We also looked at the newer product from ARCserve, their UDP product.

• The main difference was simplicity. Rubrik was heads-and-shoulders above the rest of them in terms of ease of use. 
• There was also the installation of the system and the infrastructure to run the system. Rubrik was head-and-shoulders above the other three. 
• Performance-wise, in terms of raw numbers, Rubrik was not the highest performant one, but that's also due to the way they value the systems in production. They don't try to stun the workloads while they're trying to back them up. You can work with support and change that, but that really only comes into play on your first ingest. After that, they were as performant as some of the other ones and way better than some of them.
• The last thing was that what they said they did — the features they had and what they said would happen — actually did happen. 

When we were evaluating the agent, or as Rubrik calls it, the backup service, theirs actually worked. One of their competitors' agents did not work and we were told that it was our fault that it didn't work, and for it to work we would have had to rebuild all of our Linux systems to meet their recommendations or specifications. That was a huge negative on their side, but a very big positive on the Rubrik side.

Look at what your SQL database is. If you're doing the industry standard of dump and sweep, migrate off of that as fast as you can. Get to the point where you're doing the native Rubrik backup for your databases as fast as possible. The industry-standard way can kill how much you can store on your systems, very quickly. That, in and of itself, is one of the biggest things that we learned the hard way. We thought we had a lot of time to move off and it bit us pretty hard for a period of time.

Another big lesson I've learned from using the solution is that you should use the system the way it wants to be used. There's a big mind change that you have to go through, to understand the way that the system works, depending on what you are coming from. We thought we had a good grasp of what we were actually backing up. But it turned out that there was a lot of hidden data growth that we were not expecting. That was mainly due to the fact that we had no good way of getting that information out of our previous system. If I knew everything I knew today, back when we were purchasing it, I would have bought more. But that comes with the territory of 20/20 hindsight. And having bad data, there's only so much that you can do.

Rubrik's Polaris, the SaaS-based framework for extracting metadata, sounds very interesting. We've not gone down that route at this point, but it's something that we'll be taking a look at within the next year or so.

In terms of maintenance of the system, it's pretty much just me. I'm the only one who really maintains it and, as I said, I might spend about one percent of my week dealing with the backups. It's very low maintenance.

Rubrik is a ten out of ten for sure, hands-down. They've been great. It's been one of the best engagements with a company that I've ever had.