Rubrik Reviews

In terms of automation, Rubrik has improved data management processes. It allows for automated backups without configuring the VMware server directly, using scripts to rotate backups to the VPN source automatically.

I think the best feature is its masterless architecture. Unlike other backup tools that require a controller server and media server setup, Rubrik eliminates the need to purchase additional hardware, making deployment more straightforward with a single console. Rubrik's SaaS support allows for easy deployment of on-premises and cloud backups. Compared to other backup solutions, Rubrik has a more console-based approach, which means Rubrik's backend team supports significant issues. I also find that Rubrik offers cost savings compared to other vendors due to its bundled license, allowing you to do everything with one license.

One improvement I would suggest for Rubrik is to have an inbuilt media layer facility for direct backups to tape. Currently, this requires involving a third-party partner like QSR for backup integration. Additionally, Rubrik could improve security measures for Oracle database backups by enhancing Oracle database-level capabilities. It also offers limited capabilities for backup administrators to explore and analyze backup failures. I haven't had direct experience with it yet, but I believe Rubrik is working on incorporating AI into its data management capabilities. It's gaining traction in the market, especially in India, over the last few years. I can only provide more feedback once we assess its effectiveness in data security and overall performance compared to other tools like NetBackup and Commvault.

I have two years of experience using Rubrik.

I would rate stability around eight out of ten. Stability is uncertain because Rubrik is a relatively new product, having only been around for four years. So, I can't definitively say how stable it is. However, based on my experience, I haven't encountered any significant stability issues. Compared to other backup solutions like IBM Tivoli, which was known for its stability in the market, Rubrik is still establishing itself in terms of stability.

Rubrik is a scalable solution, rated around nine out of ten for scalability.

We submit a support request and promptly receive an email from the annual support team. Overall, I find the support satisfactory.

Positive

Previously, I've worked with multiple backup technologies, including NetBackup, EMC Avamar, Networker, and Commvault.

Rubrik's setup is relatively straightforward, rating around eight out of ten. The deployment method can be chosen based on your needs, supporting both on-premises and cloud deployments.Typically, the initial setup takes about two to four hours. In contrast, the entire backup setup duration varies depending on the organization's size and requirements, ranging from one week to a month.

Rubrik is fairly priced. 

I can recommend Rubrik, but it depends on each user's specific needs and environment. Assessing your company's requirements and infrastructure is crucial before deciding on any product. Overall, I would rate Rubrik a nine out of ten. 

The main purpose of utilizing the product is to maintain immutable backups, protecting our primary data from ransomware attacks. Additionally, it facilitates meeting our restore point objectives (RPO) and restore time objectives (RTO) by centralizing all restore activities through a single tool. This unified approach eliminates the need for disparate backups stored in various locations for different products.

Two of the product's most valuable features are its single-pane-of-glass interface for managing all backup and restore operations. It effectively enables us to meet our RPO and RTO objectives. Additionally, Rubrik's immutable backups ensure the safety of our data from corruption caused by ransomware attacks.

Initially, we encountered compatibility challenges with some of our technologies, such as the inability to directly back up Snowflake databases. Additionally, they could improve the pricing.

I've been using Rubrik for approximately a year.

My experience with customer service and support was very good. They were available to help with both deployment and training.

Positive

Due to Rubrik's flexible deployment options, the initial setup was straightforward. It offers several deployment choices, including deploying it as a service or utilizing a dedicated appliance locally. Additionally, customizable deployment methods are available.

The technical team provided considerable support during implementation, greatly facilitating the process. We required approximately three competent individuals to manage both the deployment and maintenance.

While backup solutions tend to be expensive, Rubrik's pricing is even more expensive. However, there is room for improvement in pricing to make it more competitive.

The initial setup cost includes support and maintenance costs, followed by a monthly fee.

The product's protection against ransomware is a significant benefit. 

I rate it an eight out of ten.

We're using the solution for backing up email to file servers and for Oracle backups.

The solution's technical support team is very responsive and proactive.

I don't like Rubrik's user interface because it's not intuitive, and I find it hard to get the information I need. Rubrik is an expensive solution, and its pricing could be improved. There are issues with the compatibility between Oracle and Rubrik.

I have been using Rubrik for one year.

I rate Rubrik an eight out of ten for stability.

Since we're using Rubrik for backups, we don't have users logged into it. The solution is used by our IT support team, which has six to seven users.

I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution's technical support team is very responsive and proactive.

Positive

We previously used Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).

The solution's initial setup is easy enough, and we paid for a Rubrik expert to install it for us. It was easy in most systems, but there were ongoing issues with the Oracle backups.

The solution's deployment could take a week or so. However, the deployment took a few months for us because of the compatibility issues between Oracle and Rubrik.

Rubrik is an expensive solution.

Rubrik is deployed on-premises in our organization. We're also doing a total backup to the cloud. It's backed up to our main data center, where we have a Rubrik cluster. That Rubrik cluster is replicated to the Rubrik cluster in our DR center. From there, we do a total backup to an archive out to the cloud. So, we have a mixture of everything going on.

If users are buying Rubrik to back up their Oracle database, I suggest they speak to a customer who has implemented Rubrik with Oracle. They should investigate and ensure they understand what they're buying before proceeding.

Overall, I rate Rubrik a five out of ten.

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.

We primarily use Rubrik to back up and restore our VMware VMs and our Microsoft SQL databases and also to perform long-term archival.

Compared to other enterprise backup restore solutions, it is really easy to start using Rubrik to perform a backup and restore. The solution's interface is really intuitive.

For Microsoft SQL databases, Rubrik allows to perform a live mount of a database backup. Instead of doing the whole tedious restore procedure to get an older copy of the database back, you can also mount the database directly to the database from the backup storage. You will have a read-only copy on the backup server, which you can use to retrieve your old data.

Rubrik is a very scalable and high-performing backup restore solution. We can back up a large number of databases and also restore them with a very good backup restore performance.

Rubrik's disaster recovery capabilities could be improved. If you are using Rubrik and want to use it to do a quick and easy restoration of a site if one data center goes down, some small improvements can be made there.

I have been using Rubrik for four to five years.

Rubrik is a very stable solution, and we hardly have any issues with it.

Rubrik is a very scalable solution. The DBA and the server admin team, comprising approximately 15 employees, use the solution in our organization.

I rate Rubrik a nine out of ten for scalability.

We contacted the technical support team for some technical questions, and the experience was very positive. They follow up quickly on our support cases, and we get the technical expertise we seek. If we are looking for a particular feature that is not yet available, they add that requested feature to their backlog to implement it in a newer version of the solution. We are very happy with the technical support for the solution.

I rate Rubrik’s technical support eight and a half out of ten.

Positive

We previously used the latest backup restore capabilities offered by Microsoft SQL Server. We used our custom scripts and methods to perform backups and restores. We switched to Rubrik because we wanted a uniform backup restore solution and more advanced data protection against ransomware attacks. With Rubrik, we can safeguard our data more easily than our old custom backup solution.

With Rubrik, I was not involved in setting up the backup restore solution. From a database administrator's perspective, it is really easy to set it up if you want to configure backups for a database server. You have to install the agent, and then the server pops up in the Rubrik environment as a new server. Then, you can configure your backup configuration and backup policies, and you're good to go.

If you choose Rubrik, you will most likely have a positive experience. You should perform a thorough assessment and comparison to see if Rubrik is indeed the best fit for your environment. In my personal experience, Rubrik is a very good backup solution if you can afford its price.

Overall, I rate Rubrik a nine 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 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 were operating more than 10 different backup products company-wide and none of them were doing the job correctly. While reviewing the market, I found Rubrik. They were small at the time, and have since acquired a lot of credibility. The first PoC was a real success. We decided to start with them at the end of 2017. We were amazed by the product's simplicity and performance.

It improved the backup/restore process by a factor of a 1000. Now, we are sure what we have on our system is an exact image of what it was at the time of backup. Restoration validation is piece of cake. This is all new to us.

With Rubrik, there is backup window to manage. The system is able to determine when it is the best time to do backups. This is SLA-driven, and if it is not possible to maintain this SLA, the system will tell you too.

It needs to support more applications natively, like MySQL/MariaDB. 

Put more attention on the physical world. They already support it bit, but I would love to see endpoint protection.

The platform is completely stable. We have never a crash.

So far, so good.

Customer support is very efficient. It is very similar to Nutanix, in my opinion.

We tried Veeam, which could be a valid alternative, except: 

• You still need storage (Rubrik provides a turnkey solution).
• You need a Windows license (Rubrik is Linux-based).
• You still need to manage jobs (Rubrik is SLA-based).

The initial setup is easy. I created a blog post about it.

I did everything by myself.

It is hard to tell so far.

Rubrik is not cheap. Hopefully, you can archive your data on cheap storage to keep the investment minimal.

Veeam was considered, but dismissed.

Do not be afraid to go with newcomers. Rubrik is a fast growing company, and there is a reason for it: They understand the business!