Rubrik Reviews

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.

We are working now on proof of concept to do backups to virtual environments. So, we deployed the solution to three customers in Spain and one or two in Mexico.

We wish to increase the automation to improve the data management tasks with Rubrik. We see the possibility to improve with AI and other types of technologies to be more flexible and productive in operations.  

The flexibility and ease of use to do the backup. They don't use classic backup modes.  

There is room for improvement in stability. 

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. There is always room for improvement. 

We work with big customers. My company works with any type of customer, but I work with various customers. It's just banks and insurance companies. So, this solution has to have scalability and resiliency.

We have three to four customers. 

I have experience with different solutions like Oracle, Veeam, andCommvault Cloud. 

Right now, we are testing a solution for Kubernetes. We are trying to replace it, so we just don't know yet. I don't really know if Rubrik is a good solution for this. We are testing Velero (Open Source) or Kasten K10, and I don't know Rubrik's view for this type of technology.

It is easy to deploy. We have the infrastructure in the cloud and a data center on the premises. In all locations, we take a hybrid approach. 

The return on investment depends.  In our operations, we can see a 30% to 40% improvement. In the first two to three years, it's remarkable. However, monitoring at the case level can be challenging. In my experience, the combination of these benefits is really impactful.

In many cases, the customers I speak with want to have a one or three-year license. Because it's for backup, they need the ability to increase or replace the solution as they need. They want to have a monthly price to go with the use of the solution.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I recommend using it to other users. 

There have been many changes to how our organization has been able to approach backup and recovery thanks to Rubrik. We have been able to reduce the time for recovery, which is invaluable because it not only frees up our time to move on to other things, but it truly makes our customers feel that they are important and given “special treatment.” Typically, with the previous solutions we were using, it was owned fully by our engineering team, but we were able to train our admin team to take over all operational aspects of the product in less than two hours via a web conference thanks to the no-nonsense and easy-to-use product.

This has also become our go-to solution for disaster recovery requirements for many of our applications. The great part is we don’t have to build out DR VMs to sit there and do nothing, instead, we can deploy a snapshot from production at the time of need instead. This not only saves the customer money, but it saves on bloat in our virtual environment.

First, lets start with what is Rubrik?

Rubrik Cloud Data Management is a single, software fabric that manages all application data in the cloud, at the edge, or on-premises for many use cases, including backup, recovery, archival, analytics, development, and cloud. Rubrik takes the complexity of maintaining and managing your data and enables you to focus on other aspects of the business. The bottomline is if you have Rubrik, you have peace of mind.

It’s hard to pick out a few features to list, but I will start with these:

• Instant recovery: This has dramatically reduced our time to restore from over 20-30 minutes for a server to be recovered and back up and running, to less than 60 seconds. It’s a beautiful thing.
• The search functionality is second to none as the speed of the search is fast across the whole system and predictive.
• I also love the fact that I can apply an SLA domain to various areas (direct to VM, folder, cluster, etc.). I currently apply most SLA domains directly to a cluster so that we have a set-it-and-forget-it approach. When a new VM is added to that cluster, we KNOW that it is going to inherit the SLA domain and be backed up.
• Lastly, Rubrik’s support team is phenomenal. Any time that we have had questions, issues or feature requests, the team responds rapidly and keeps you apprised of the progress without you having to follow-up all the time.

We have put in a feature request against their physical agent. Currently, the physical server agent will only back up folder structures and not truly give you the ability to restore to a bare-metal box. Well, we would love to see the physical agent have the ability to essentially P2V machines from the backup. This would be huge!

It would assist in so many areas of our virtualization projects and especially during a DR scenario. If I could take a snapshot from a physical and be able to stand it up as a virtual immediately without the need to rebuild an entire system and restoring files, that would be HUGE. It would also give us the ability to get away from physical hardware, in general, when we go through to clean up older physical boxes that are no longer under service contract or need to be segregated for any reason.

For instance, we have an initiative to get all 2003 physical servers left in our environment to a segregated cluster and we do use P2V to get them, so bypassing the P2V and just restoring a backup would speed that process up tremendously.

I have not encountered any instabilities with the product outside of limitations on the back end with our AD user object size. We have so many users that Rubrik has an issue handling so many objects, so it makes it difficult to use the RBAC features that were just released in the Firefly/3.0 code release. That being said, Rubrik support has been phenomenal working on this issue with the engineering team and we look forward to their solution very soon.

Scalability has been a great process, as we have gone through a few at this point. Rubrik handles everything. They will come onsite, upgrade the units, ensure all is working properly and it typically only takes a couple of hours. That being said, we have deployments in multiple locations and they do not currently have a management hub that allows you to manage multiple clusters from a single place. You have to go cluster to cluster to make changes.

Rubrik’s technical support has been phenomenal! They are extremely quick to respond and 99% of the time, they are able to take care of everything behind the scenes via the Support Tunnel. They not only respond to emails almost instantaneously, they will contact us about potential issues before they happen.

They have been extremely easy to understand on the phone and encourage you to write in, even with simple questions and feature requests. That has been huge, too: feature requests. We have put in numerous feature requests that were coded in amazing time, not that every feature request has come to fruition, but most have been at least put on the roadmap if they made sense globally.

We used many different products before going to Rubrik, including Tivoli and SnapManager, Nutanix Protection Domains, NetBackup, etc. They were all cumbersome and typically a pain to not only set up, but to recover from as well. By switching to Rubrik, we have been able to simplify many aspects of our backup and recovery procedures.

On top of that, we were able to gain back valuable space on our Nutanix clusters, as we were finding in some instances that snapshots were taking up 50% of the available datastores, which we all know, with Nutanix, is NOT cheap. By switching, we were able to gain that space back for VM deployments instead of having to buy additional blocks as the constraint with Nutanix has typically always been the space, not the CPU and memory.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward as Rubrik sends a field engineer out to handle everything. This goes for expansions as well. We had our initial two sites from the PoC stood up in less than two hours per site. The only reason it wasn’t faster was due to how locked down our network is. Other products we stood up at the same time took far longer to set up, and I mean one was two weeks before we could use it.

I would say that the biggest thing to keep in mind about the pricing, as it may be more expensive than other products you are looking at, is keep the operational ease in mind. Most of the other products we looked at would take far more time to manage, train and just in general use! So, when we compared the overall costs, Rubrik was cheaper because the engineering and operational side required FAR LESS dedication. So, all in all, they actually were cheaper than the competition.

We looked at many other products, including our existing solutions and products like Veeam and Cohesity. First off, Rubrik had the upper hand for the initial interest based on this... We have all gone through meetings to vet a new product of interest. During these meetings, you ask questions and get a lot of, “Oh, no one has ever asked that before” or “Let me get back to you on that,” whereas the Rubrik team had an answer for EVERY one of our questions, right then and there. That is a pretty rare thing in and of itself. That was a huge factor but obviously, the simplicity during the demo was a huge eye-catcher.

I would highly recommend this product to ANY company who is concerned about their backup and recovery processes as well as DR scenarios. This product will simplify your life beyond belief. Not only that, you will be able to give the recovery process over to anyone, even if they don’t have a background in backup and recovery solutions.

The fact that the product is so well thought out in its simplicity for end users, makes it easy to worry less about whether or not it’s doing its job. You will have much higher confidence that you will actually be able to recover the system you are working with, instead of, “I hope it’s been backed up properly.” It will change the way you view your data, especially if you are looking for an effective and simple way to handle disaster recovery.

I have given this product a perfect rating for multiple reasons. The simplicity and ease of use are hands down better than any product we compared during the same PoC period. We have never had an issue with our system on the software or hardware side, other than an issue with the amount of objects their back end will handle for AD user authentication.

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 conducted a thorough evaluation of various vendors through an RFP process, comparing Rubrik with other solutions like Commvault. Ultimately, we chose Rubrik due to its cost-effectiveness and its strong capabilities in backing up our predominantly virtualized environment, particularly within VMware. 

Integrating Rubrik into our existing data protection strategy was straightforward. We deployed the Rubrik cluster and connected it to vCenter. We set up local service accounts for Rubrik to initiate snapshots and used VMware tags to align backup schedules and retention policies with Rubrik's SLAs. Different tags were used for production, dev/test, and database servers, triggering specific backup processes accordingly.

Rubrik has provided us with peace of mind by offering immutable snapshots and backups, reducing concerns about data encryption. We've successfully restored various systems without issues, even older versions. It allows us to temporarily restore systems in parallel with production, facilitating interaction or file transfer between them, which is particularly useful for setting up test environments.

Regarding disaster recovery, Rubrik, coupled with cloud storage from Wasabi, enhances our capabilities by enabling us to restore to another data center in a different state. While Rubrik may not be ideal for immediate environment restoration, we leverage other technologies like VMware and Nutanix AHV for faster recovery with minimal data loss, ensuring critical systems are up and running within minutes.

Rubrik's immutability feature ensures the security of our backups by preventing unauthorized alterations. The most effective feature for simplifying our data backup processes is the ability to perform on-demand or scheduled backups and restores, which greatly enhances manageability.

The security and compliance features have had a positive impact on our data management practices. We utilize Rubrik not only for virtual machine backups but also for backing up approximately twenty terabytes of unstructured data, including file shares and documents. This allows users to easily restore deleted documents using the Soft Delete feature, depending on the backup frequency.

The web interface could benefit from some improvement, particularly in terms of alerting and dashboard clarity. The cloud web interface is somewhat confusing and could use more development attention. Additionally, it's essential to ensure that local on-premise management options remain available alongside cloud-based solutions, as internet availability can affect backup management. Regarding features, cross-hypervisor restore functionality would be a valuable addition, allowing for greater flexibility in restoring VMs across different environments. 

I have been using Rubrik for the past five years.

Rubrik's initial deployment was straightforward.

Rubrik's competitive pricing and strong return on investment make it a compelling choice, especially compared to alternatives like Data Domain and Avamar. Commvault was considered but deemed too expensive.

I highly recommend requesting an on-site demo to fully evaluate Rubrik's capabilities before making a decision. Overall, I rate Rubrik as a ten for its effectiveness as a backup solution.

It is used for backing up and restoring data.

Rubrik does snapshot backups. We have a virtual machine, which is a production machine. It is a production database server. We take a snapshot of the server to back up in Rubrik. When we need to test a version, or we need to test an application to do Windows patching and other things, we just stand up a virtual machine from the snapshot, put it in our test environment, and use that to test our patching. Everything that we have in production is also there in the test environment. So, when we test the patch, if anything breaks, we know we can't deploy it in production.

It is also useful in case a VM crashes. When a VM gets corrupted or crashes, we can just stand one up from last night's snapshot. We have our VM up in less than five minutes.

The feature that I found most valuable is Live Mount. You can either mount a virtual machine from a snapshot, or you can mount a volume from the snapshot. You can mount one disk to the server to retrieve data, or you can mount the whole VM, rename it, and use it as a test VM. If your VM gets corrupted, you just mount one from the snapshot, and you have your production VM's backup. So, Live Mount is definitely the best feature for me as an end-user.

Another feature that I love is their ransomware detection. Rubrik has one of the best ransomware detection out there. 

The backups are immutable, and nobody can change them. You can't override them. You can't change anything in the backups once the snapshot is taken. Our backup retention is 120 days. So, for 120 days, nobody can change that. When I take a snapshot of a server, if the next day we get hit with ransomware, I could shut that down. I can then just stand one up from the backup that I took yesterday. They can't change anything that is already in the backup.

There is room for improvement in pricing. After the licensing, the price tends to go up as time goes by. 

It is very stable.

It is definitely scalable. It is used to the extent of any other application in our production environment. We will definitely increase its usage.

Because this is a backup and restore application, only system administrators are the ones who schedule all the backups and do all the restores. There is also an option where you could give a user permission to do certain things. For example, we have DBAs who have access to restore databases. They cannot overwrite anything, but they can mount, and they can copy.

When you sign a contract with them, support is a part of the package. Their tech support was very knowledgeable. They allow you to do your work, and if you run into a problem, they jump in and help you. They explain the issue to you so that in the future, you know what you're doing next. They don't just do things behind the scenes to fix things. They keep us in the loop. Their technical support is second to none.

We used Commvault. Commvault had started to become a little bit cumbersome when it was time to do upgrades. We had all physical servers from Commvault. We had 12 media agents, and at the time of upgrade, we had to individually upgrade all 12 media agents. So, upgrading with Commvault was a two-week project for us, whereas upgrading with Rubrik is a two-hour project.

It was totally straightforward. There was absolutely no stress or chaos. It was an easy deployment and easy migration.

Our environment is pretty huge. We have about 8,000 to 9,000 servers. The deployment took a few months. It probably took five to six months, but the nice thing about it was that Rubrik's support was there all the time. They were involved at every step till we completed our migration.

For deployment, we had two people from Rubrik. From our side, we had five people for deployment. For its maintenance, there are three people who take care of it all the time. They're backup administrators. They back up and restore the system. We have one engineer who is involved in this project for designing and implementation, which is me.

My boss and his seniors would know how much money they have invested and how much money or value it is bringing. From my perspective, it is saving us a lot of money because previously, we had Commvault, TSM, NetBackup, and Veeam. Replacing these four with Rubrik has definitely saved us a lot of money.

Its price tends to go up with time. Its pricing definitely has room for improvement. If you negotiate right with them, you might get a good price.

Support is a part of the package, and every three years, when we renew our contract, we get new hardware.

We evaluated Cohesity. We had NetBackup, but Rubrik was best geared for us because we also have a cloud initiative. So, we needed a solution that we could use to back up on-prem and to the cloud. We wanted to be able to swap virtual machines from on-prem. We wanted to take an on-prem virtual machine and stand it up in the cloud. Rubrik had exactly what we needed. One of the main features that helped us make our decision was ransomware detection.

If data security is one of your main priorities, I would definitely recommend Rubrik. Its features work great. They have all the features that I need. What I would like us to purchase is a feature called Sonar, where you run a scan, and it tells you where patient data is sitting. If an end-user has patient data on the desktop, it'll tell you that this is where the patient data is. So, we can see who is really within compliance and who is not.

I would rate Rubrik a nine out of 10.

Our primary use case is to back up our physical and virtual environments. The solution is deployed both on-prem and in the cloud. 

We use Rubrik to protect virtual, physical, and cloud-native environments.

The types of systems and applications protected by the solution include VMs, SQL, NOS servers, and Office 365. 

The solution reduced the time we spend on recovery testing, and the Live Mount feature greatly helps with that. We can instantly restore required files without needing a traditional recovery, and depending on the type of file, we can have time savings of 50-70%.   

The solution reduced our recovery time by 20-30%; we noticed a gradual difference compared to other tools. 

In terms of overall productivity, we have fewer people working on backup, which significantly improves productivity. 

The backups with Office 365 happen seamlessly, and I can manage all the native Microsoft solutions in a single pane. 

The Live Mount feature is excellent; it's useful for the backup administrator and end user.

The SLA-based policy automation is very effective in cloud archiving, as we have archives in the cloud.

Regarding the solution's archival functionality, there is a Hot and Cold Tier concept, a handy feature we can implement within Rubrik. 

We used the solution's Polaris, SaaS-based framework for extracting metadata, and the compliance and governance are excellent, especially during audits.  

I want to see more features regarding filtering in the Snapshot Window, as I need to be able to set a filter for specific dates and times. If I want to check an old backup, I must scroll through one or two years of backups to find what I'm looking for.

The reporting is another area with room for improvement; it needs to be more detailed and have more options for customization. Nowadays, reporting is primarily automated, so I'd like to see the same from Rubrik.

I've been using Rubrik for three years. 

Native Rubrik is stable, but we have struggled a lot with stability in our recently installed cloud-based instance of the solution.

The solution is scalable, and it's straightforward to scale. We have around ten users, including database and server administrators, plus security staff. Most users have read-only access, and a few have write access too.

The technical support in India is excellent; they are quick to respond and resolve issues.

Positive

I previously used Commvault and EMC NetWorker. We switched because Rubrik is more affordable and user-friendly.

The initial setup was straightforward, and it took approximately one hour to get up and running. There are many background steps to take regarding network configuration. I carried out the deployment and perform the maintenance for the solution by myself. 

With this kind of product, we get an ROI when a problem occurs, but we haven't faced any outages or ransomware. The recovery and backups are there, but thankfully, we haven't encountered a situation where we needed them. 

We use Rubrik Go, the provider's evergreen subscription purchasing program, and it's affordable. 

There are additional costs for add-ons, and they recently upgraded a new cluster, which also carries a price.

We evaluated Veeam and are considering looking at it again, as the virtualization is better, and Rubrik has some issues with Azure.

I rate Rubrik nine out of ten. 

I highly recommend the solution as it's very user-friendly and easy to work with out-of-the-box; there's nothing complex about it.

We have yet to integrate Rubrik with other solutions, but we plan to integrate it with vCenter.

The solution didn't save us time on managing backups as such, but the UI is very user friendly.

We do not use the solution's ransomware recovery. 

I have yet to learn if Rubrik reduces downtime because we haven't faced that issue. Whenever I did a test restore, it happened so quickly that we didn't really have downtime.

Our use cases are for backing up all critical databases on our SQL servers. It also backs up critical virtual machines in our VMware environment.

The most specific reason why Rubrik is a step above just about everyone else out there is that it's cutting edge. With Live Mount I can instantly spin up a server for backup in less than two minutes. It takes 10 minutes to backup and it also takes under a few minutes to recover. With Avamar, these would take an hour or more.

The ease of use is the most valuable feature. It is a very simple system compared to just about any other backup technology like Commvault or EMC Avamar. It is extremely easy to use and very versatile.

They have what's called an organization which means different groups of access to Rubrik, but the alerting only goes to the admins. My suggestion to Rubrik is to make sure that the separate organizations or groups of users get the appropriate alerting.

I have been using Rubrik for six months. 

The hardware is on-premises and also replicates to the cloud. It's a backup appliance but that appliance has software on it. We are also utilizing a software version at another data center where we're not going to install the hardware. And it also tiers to the cloud.

Rubrik seems rock-solid to me. We haven't had that many issues, we're able to backup and recover things a lot faster. We haven't had that many support tickets as opposed to other solutions.

It's very scalable. You're able to add additional controllers and also add storage on the file. It's also expanding their Polaris, which is their online software manageability portion. That, in their future release, will allow us to manage all of our Rubrik clients at all of our data centers which is excellent for scalability.

We have around 20 users. The majority of those are our database administrators. They are allowed access to database servers, so they can do their backups, manage backups, and recover backups. A handful of people in the U.S. and Canada are the backup administrators. The overall maintenance works on the machines to backup schedules and recovery.

For the maintenance, you can do it with as little as one person per site. We have five to 10 people for both Canada and U.S., which is five data centers.

My role is to design and implement this technology. Our systems administrators who manage the VMware environment would be the ones that would handle the day to day with the Rubrik backups and recovery.

We're in the process of replacing all the old backup technology with this. We're looking at roughly 300 virtual machines per data center. So we're looking at an environment that is probably 3000 virtual machines. The database count for all of those is probably in the hundreds. It's pretty significant. We have around a 65% adoption rate. 

Rubrik has the best vendor support that I've dealt with. They're probably the best. They're the most knowledgeable, they're the most respectful, they call a lot better, they will follow through to the end. Not like with VMware.

We used Commvault in Canada and in the U.S. we had Dell EMC Avamar.

We switched from them because of the cost of ownership. The complicity of Avamar, the fact that Avamar constantly had software and hardware errors that had to be dealt with support, and the fact that Dell EMC support is horrendous made us switch. They would not take ownership of an issue and work it through to the end. They'd give us a one-word answer. It was a nightmare.

There are not very many pros, as far as staying with the Avamar solution. It's old, it's outdated, it's slow, and it only half works. It's extremely expensive. It takes forever to restore. There isn't a pro to keeping the old solution.

I didn't use Commvault that much. That was our UK team or our Canada team. I couldn't give too many details. I know that it was an older solution as well, and I know that they were having issues with it.

Versus any other solution, Rubrik was a lot simpler to configure. The first system was up, on the network and configured and ready to backup in under 20 minutes, versus multiple days of configuration with another solution.

We used Rubrik and we also used one of our vendors for the deployment. Rubrik was very knowledgeable and knows what they're doing especially because it's pretty new to them. We had to bring on Rubrik resources, but Rubrik is an excellent company to support.

We have seen ROI. The cost is much cheaper. It's also because I was able to recover three machines in 15 minutes versus nine hours.

Anyone who's using Rubrik or any solution is to do a POC, or a proof of concept, that is key. If you can do a proof of concept and you can put the device on your environment and test it, it would justify any costs that Rubrik will be asking for that product.

I believe we looked at Cohesity. There's a couple of other EMC solutions. Their latest, IPDA, is their latest Avamar solution. It's an integrated Avamar. It also was not appealing. It was expensive. And it had the same complicity and the same slowness the old system had.

Cohesity wasn't an instant recovery, like Rubrik. That was the main issue. Live Mount is one thing that I think customers will find a blessing. It gives you the ability to just spin up a machine that's already been backed up instantly on your network. No one else can touch that.

My advice would be to work closely with their personnel to implement it. For a large organization like ourselves create an internal project with a project manager.

You can have different departments and teams work together on implementing the different systems from the old backup solution to the new backup solution because you will have to have different teams working in cohesion to change that over.

The biggest lesson I would say I've learned using Rubrik would go for any new technology. Make sure to do a proof of concept with another vendor at every device and build a test plan, a project on how you want to test that product and put it through all the different tests. Ask: how fast does it back up, fast does it recover, how easy is it to use, what is their support department like?

I would rate Rubrik an eight out of ten. Their product is getting better. There are still some things that they need to polish off. In comparison, I would give Avamar a two out of 10.