Rubrik Reviews

Our primary use case is to back everything up. Rubrik backs up all of our servers on a schedule that takes the bulk of every bit of the mundane tasks out of our hands. It automates everything and frees us up to be able to look at issues where something may not have backed up correctly. We can then investigate those servers to see if they need to be updated or if there's a problem. 

A lot of times, admin will drop new servers out without telling anybody. We have SLA domains set up in order to catch those so that we're not completely caught off guard by them. We can put them in the proper SLA for the correct backup schedule and proper retention if it needs to be replicated automatically right away and from one site to the other. From there, if it needs to be kept longer, it'll go up to the cloud for cold storage.

When it comes to saving time managing our backups, Rubrik has saved us a lot of time compared to what we were using. It feels like it has saved us lifetimes of time because the process used to be difficult. It's not just the day to time savings. When something goes wrong, that's where the real time savings comes into play. We are able to get back to where we need to be more confidently and with much fewer steps.

As far as the day-to-day stuff goes, I don't know if there is a way to put an actual value on that other than things are not nearly as hectic on the day-to-day, stressing over whether or not the backups ran because, with Rubrik, we already know they ran.

In terms of reducing our recovery time, it has saved us hours. For a recovery event, it used to take hours into days and now it's less than an hour, it takes minutes. It's really impressive. Rubrik makes the job much easier. It's very intuitive, where everything used to be very complicated. You can almost have better job security because of how complicated it was. Whereas now, the setup of the whole system takes no time. There's a lot of day-to-day time savings that allows us to get freed up to do other things, but also to make sure that what we do have is working optimally. Before, there was a lot of stuff that would fall through the cracks that we wouldn't really know about until something went wrong.

Rubrik affects my team's productivity. I'm not even the main backup specialist on our team, but it freed up enough time for our backup specialists to show me how to do everything. It's ridiculously easy. It's simple enough for me to be able to do it where it's not my top priority task throughout the day. When something happens and someone needs a recovery, I'm able to go in and do it, even though I haven't done it in a week or so. Before, there wouldn't have been the time to show anyone else or take the time to actually learn to be able to instruct someone else on how to do it effectively and correctly.

It provides a lot of time for education and deep-diving into figuring out why certain things didn't work and then correcting those issues.

We protect virtual environments. It's all VMware, SQL database, and a few Oracle. There are some physical machines as well that require backup agents.

The recovery is the most valuable feature. The interface is very clean, streamlined, and simple to actually perform a recovery. It's four clicks away from being done, depending on what you want to do. That's on something that is already automated on top of that. All of the backups are already automated, so when something comes up and someone's requesting a backup or recovery of a server for whatever reason, it takes very little time to get in, find what you're looking for, and get it done. It's not a drawn-out process. 

The web interface is very intuitive. I compare it to an iPhone. Everything is where you expect it to be. The main tabs are very well laid out. The drop-downs inside of those tabs make sense. It's very easy to use and it makes sense. It's not the traumatic experience of older products.

The learning curve is incredibly short. The beautiful part about it is that it makes sense so that you don't have to use it every single day to be able to go back in and do what you want to do. There's a lot to be said for that.

I use Rubrik daily to ensure that everything backed up as expected. I look to see what may or may not have backed up and why. I do that aspect now a lot more. I do backups periodically when the main contact is not available. 

We use SLA-based policy automation. It solidified our data protection operations. That alone gave us the ability to simplify and streamline the process. We were able to come down with independent SLAs that met the specific needs for whatever department or server was being protected. Whether it's production, DevTest, utility servers, whatever the case is, there are individual SLAs that we're able to make simple changes at the wholesale level, if we need to. Once they're set up, they're good to go. It makes things very easy and we can set up a bunch of them which makes life tremendously easier.

In terms of the archival functionality, we pushed things off to S3 and it works. At that point, when you're bringing things back from archival, that can be a little slow, but that's a matter of things outside of Rubrik's control. It depends on what it is, where it's at, how old it is, and what it is you're paying for.

Predictive Search to find servers makes life so much easier. We're able to drill down and put it in a simple part of whatever server name it is. A lot of times people need the server restored. We check the server name and they give us some name that's not exactly the technical server name. We're able to fish down and find what we're looking for much quicker than trying to rely on them to give us the proper name. The Predictive Search definitely helps everywhere.

Our main Rubrik guy has used the API. I continually hear that it needs better documentation. I can't even get the API to work right but that's mainly on me. 

If there was something that we could get Rubrik to fix, it would be when our DBS takes snapshots of a server or the database, the replication doesn't kick off fast enough. They can't remote it to the peer site and manipulate it back up in order to move it over, take a copy of production, slap it over, and test it out. As I understand, they are working on it. Replication works. We also get spoiled by how good things are now. We get to a point where it is so easy but when something isn't instant gratification, it seems that everything else is so amazing, why isn't this right?

They're doing everything I need it to do. When everything works so well, and it's so fast, and then you stumble upon something that's not the speed of light, it's confusing. 

I've been using Rubrik for five years. 

We use both SaaS and physical appliances because we have Edge devices that are considered physical, but for the most part, the majority of everything we do is SaaS.

It's always on. It is available all the time.

Scalability is not an issue. 

Technical support is pretty good. You can reach out to a support agent and have someone talking to you that you can actually work with after 15 minutes. Opening tickets online is decent. 

If you give them a sad face on a review, someone will reach out and ask what happened and what they can do better. They're definitely all about customer service and customer support.

The installation was pretty simple.

The deployment strategy was four nodes on each side of each location and we have two locations. We did a POC and it was set up in no time. It was ridiculously fast and simple. Now, we're up to 16 nodes in each location.

There's not much to it. It's not a 28 step process. There's a little bit to it but it's plug-and-play, as much as a solution could be. 

My advice would be to do a proof of concept. You won't be sorry. Play with it. We came from other products that were nowhere near as capable or user-friendly as Rubrik, so when we got in, it was a night and day difference that Rubrik was so easy. 

Rubrik is so much better. We're always looking at other avenues and options because other companies will always ask us to show us their product but there's nothing out there that has made us even consider switching. There's a lot to be said for competence.

I would rate Rubrik a ten out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been a Rubrik customer since 2017.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

This is our main backup system. All of our VMs, our hardware hosts; everything is backed up using Rubrik.

Disaster recovery is one of the options we have explored, so that in case of a big disaster we could utilize their image conversion to run our VMs on AWS, but that is just a proof of concept at this stage. We have tested it. It works. But we don't have a proper plan in place for that.

We have only one physical server that we are protecting with it and the rest are all virtual servers. We have around 400 server VMs and all of them are protected using Rubrik. Most of our environment, around 90 percent, is VMware, while 10 percent of our environment is Hyper-V. 

With the VMs we are also taking backups of our CIFS shares. We have our file clusters running Windows Servers so we are taking backups using the SMB mount. We have NFS clusters as well, for the Linux side, which we're backing up using the built-in NFS connectors. We explored SQL backups, but right now we are using our SQL Server to dump the data and then the files are being backed up. We're not directly backing up SQL using Rubrik.

The SLA-based policy automation has had a very good effect on our data protection operations. We came from Commvault and we used to have tape backups. It was a full-time job for one of our sys admins to update the tape library, replace the tape cartridges, recycle them, scratch them, and then bring them back. It was a huge process. We were using offsite storage to store our tape backups which were continuously going back and forth from our campus. Now it's all automated. We barely have to manage anything. We are now consumers instead of actually setting this up. It was one set up and we just maintain it now.

It saves us time when it comes to managing backups because we barely do anything, other than just verify. We get a daily report to see if any of the VMs are out of our SLA. The only action item we have, if something is out of SLA, is to verify what happened, why the backup failed or missed its window. Given that it was tape before, it has gone from hours to minutes. It used to be more proactive, where we were continuously checking everything and replacing the tapes and making sure that everything went through. Now, it's more of a reactive situation, where we only look at a backup when there is an issue.

It has also definitely reduced the time we spend on recovery testing, because it can do Live Mounts and that does not require an actual recovery. So our VMs are instantly available. And the file restore feature allows us to explore the file system of every VM, instead of restoring it, and then just restore the files that we need, and that has been amazing so far as well. Within a few minutes, we have either the VM or the files available. I don't even know how to compare it to Commvault and the tape backups. When I joined Harvard, they already were on Rubrik and we were decommissioning Commvault, so I know a little bit about the process. We do classroom recordings in Harvard Law School and those were still going to Commvault. That was the last project that I was involved in and I saw the crazy amount of work involved where we had to bring all the tape libraries from safe.

And when it comes to recovery time itself, it's an instant recovery in most circumstances, even if we have to recover something that's more than three days old. In our environment, after something is more than three days old it goes to an archival location on S3. When we restore data that is between three and 42 days old it is downloaded from S3 and then made available. For us, that situation is a little bit slower compared to the Live Mount. Depending on the size of the VM, it could range between a few minutes to a few hours. But if the data is on premises, it downloads the data instantly.

We don't have to worry about the solution too much, which definitely has helped our productivity. Most of our workflow is automated, where VMs are automatically added. The SLA is automatically assigned. Things are automatically archived. Anyone can take action. We have on-call people who look at the reports and take action as needed.

There is a live-restore feature, their Live Mount, and the way it works we can instantly recover a VM, a past backup, to be directly attached to our VMware environment. Rubrik will act as a disk for it. It's like an instant restore. Within a few minutes our VM is up and running. And then, if we want to restore it, we can just migrate it to our actual storage.

Rubrik's web interface is very simple to use. We have a very simple SLA configured so that everything is backed up every day. Any new VMs we configure in our environment automatically get added, the SLA is automatically assigned to them. All the VMs, after three days, are archived to AWS S3, and then there's a life cycle on the AWS side to work with that.

The archival functionality is one of the main features because the Rubrik that we have has about 60 or 70 TB of total local storage, which is definitely not enough for our data. We have around 140 TB of data stored on AWS and, without the archival feature, we would have to buy at least three times the number of nodes that we currently have to keep all the data secure for 42 days, based on our SLA. It's definitely saving us on costs. It also gets us away from having to keep redundancy on the data, because if we were storing it on-premises we would have to make sure that we have redundancy and offsite storage. Now, all of that is AWS. We no longer have to worry about that.

Capacity reports could definitely be improved. It's hard to determine what is using the space and why. For instance, you can see that some host is using 2 TB on the Rubrik node and the disk space on that host is 400 GBs. It's hard to explain how there can be 2 TBs of data on local storage when nothing has changed on the host for the past three days. 

They have improved a lot on the SLA reports. We used to get a lot of false alerts before, because a snapshot was missed. In the reports it would remain a "non-compliant to an SLA for 42 days, until the 42 cycles were done. They've removed that. If it misses an SLA and if you take another snapshot or to take an automatic backup, it automatically fixes the SLA report to show us it's protected.

Most of their documentation for cloud stuff can be improved. This could be old information, as we did the PoC last year and maybe their documentation has been updated now, but we literally had to contact support every day, and at every step for things like, "Okay, what do we do with the AMIs? How do we get Rubrik configured? How do we convert the image?" None of that was available in a single documentation format. It was spread around in different documentation.

I've been using Rubrik for the past three years, since I joined Harvard, but I think it was deployed on-premises four or five years back.

It's very stable. We have had an instance where one of the nodes was offline for no reason, but working with their support it was determined that there was a cache issue and they fixed it.

We don't have to worry about backups. We have been using it for more than four years and so far there hasn't been a single incident where we have had any issues recovering any of the files or VMs. It is very robust, continuously updating.

They have everything available by API, which is a good thing because this is the way that things are going forward with an API-first infrastructure. In terms of their physical nodes you can also scale them, but there's a requirement of always increasing in sets of three more nodes. We have one Brik and four nodes currently, and to increase our storage we would have to buy three more nodes, which is kind of a limitation. It would have been nice if we could just buy one node and increase that way, gradually, instead of buying three large nodes. But I can't complain about it. That's probably their infrastructure.

We are using it for everything except our media storage. Our classroom recordings are directly archived to glacier and everything else goes through Rubrik. The reason for that is that we don't want on-premises storage of the media. These are large video recordings and it would be very expensive to store them locally. Rubrik keeps a local copy for three days, for regular backups. We are actually testing a new feature where you can connect to NAS storage and there will be no local data, only metadata, stored locally. Everything else is archived. We have tested this feature with their support. They showed it to us but we haven't acquired the license to start using it yet.

Only sys admins have access to Rubrik in our organization. Currently, 10 of our sys admins have access to the system. 

Rubrik support is amazing. When we are involved in upgrades we always open a ticket and there is a tech person joined through a tunnel and looking at the upgrade while it's being done. It's like everything is off our shoulders in terms of managing it. If something goes wrong, they're always available to support us.

Every time we've opened a ticket with them, even to explore new features, we have always gotten an instant response, and even when it comes to trial licenses. The whole proof of concept project we did on AWS for DR was provided from their support, and it has been amazing. The experience has been really good.

Most of the time, their turnaround time for tickets is less than 24 hours, especially with high-priority tickets. Recently, we have had some issues with our VM storage sizes not reflected properly. We were looking at a capacity report and we were seeing some of the VMs using way more storage on Rubrik than they should. This has been a difficult problem and they have continued to escalate it to different engineers. That is the longest interaction we have had and the issue is still pending.

We are not running the bleeding edge, so there is a possibility that if we do switch to 5.2 we might see an improvement already on that deduplication; that might be the reason that this is happening. They are looking into it. They have suggested a couple of actions from our end to actually delete those backups, archive them, and restart the backups, but they're still looking into it.

We wanted to get away from tapes. We tried Veeam but it did not work very well for us. There were a couple of shortcomings which we couldn't maintain, plus it wasn't cloud-ready at that moment, at least not to the extent that Rubrik was.

Rubrik was very fresh in the market at that time, but it was bringing features that we were looking for. We were already set on using either Azure or AWS and it had the needed support for them.

I've been involved with upgrades but not an install because we just have the one on-premise device. I've been involved in multiple proofs of concepts. For example, they launched a couple of features along the way where we were testing cloud workloads and converting our images to native AWS images so that we could use it as a disaster recovery site in the future, if needed. All of our backups are going to AWS.

Upgrades are very straightforward. Their support is always with us, so we haven't had any hiccups during the upgrades. They go very smoothly. I've been involved in multiple upgrades, and we were at some point running the bleeding edge software, when we were looking for some features that were available, without any issues. So we did upgrade to the latest and greatest version. Our general policy is to stay one version behind to iron out all the bugs. But with Rubrik we have attempted to run the latest version, to use the features, and it has been stable enough for us and the upgrades have gone smoothly.

We usually block out a two-hour maintenance window for upgrades. There have been major upgrades which required some database work, and they have taken more time. In the move from version 4 to version 5 their whole database infrastructure was changed.

We got grandfathered in the licensing terms. Their licensing is much more narrow now and you have to buy licenses for every cloud feature, but we got most of those things as a package.

We got really good pricing because we're in the education sector and we were one of the first big organizations to start using Rubrik.

Recently, when we were looking for direct backup to glacier, we started using CloudBerry which is a very basic product. It's a standalone install on our media servers and it's directly backing up to glacier. It's a single unit license on the single server; there's no hardware involved with it.

The only advantage of CloudBerry is that we're not keeping an on-premises copy. When we take a backup with Rubrik it creates an on-premises copy of all of our media files and then uploads them, and that requires more storage on Briks that we don't want to spend money on. The Rubrik feature we tested, where you connect to NAS storage, wasn't available when we acquired the license from CloudBerry.

Rubrik is an amazing product. There are some features still missing. For example, you cannot do a granular backup or restore of Active Directory. That has been on my wish list. I have posted that on their tech forum where people discuss new features and new things that they are launching. I know that it will come because they have been adding other granular backup support with VSS. The AD-level granular backup, so we can restore a single account or a single computer, is the one of the last features that we are requesting. They usually do bring out whatever features we request in their next update.

We have not used the solution's ransomware recovery. I have attended a couple of seminars where they have recently been talking about that, but we haven't tested it. We haven't had any incidents which would require us to use that feature.

We have also not used its pre-built integrations or API support for integrations with other solutions. We played with a couple of features, such as the organization features to segregate some of our VMs, but we found that it was not possible the way we handle the system. We wanted to make our domain controller backups inaccessible to our backup administrators, because we wanted that to be part of the DCA job. So we explored the organizations, but the way it works we would have had to move everything into an organization and our backup administrators were taking care of everything except domain controllers. So we dropped the idea of using organizations.

In terms of downtime, I don't think Rubrik has reduced that in a meaningful way. We have a pretty redundant environment anyway. If something happens to our VMware hosts, the VMs automatically fail over to other hosts so there is rarely any downtime. We have been off physical servers for quite some time. If there were physical servers, Rubrik could help reduce downtime, but since we don't have physical servers we don't even know what the recovery would look like with Rubrik. With tapes it was crazy when something happened. If someone did not look at RAID and we had a two-drive failure or a three-drive failure, then it would be a full recovery from tape. But now, because everything is running on VMs, we have no downtime, most of the time.

Overall the product is really good. Rubrik is very competitive. Even if you now look at their positioning on the industry review sites, they are doing really well. It's a very good product. We recommended the product to our Central IT department. We are Harvard Law School, but Harvard has a Central IT which manages other schools, and they are doing a PoC right now. It's a good product to recommend.

We are a financial company and we have redundant data centers, with a VMware Metro Cluster staged between the two locations. We have Rubrik running in our data center and it is used for backing up our on-premises infrastructure.

We keep the backup of the environment on-premises for two weeks, just to be able to restore in case we lose or corrupt part of the virtual infrastructure. We also send copies of some of the data into the cloud for long-term archiving because we're under a regulatory requirement to store certain parts of the business data for up to seven years.

At this point, our environment is probably close to 90% virtual. We use physical servers for market data and essentially, there is nothing to back up on those systems because there's no data that's worth saving there. Should one of these servers fail, we just put a new one in place. It would be deployed, including the operating system, and it would start processing market data for us. We consider these as compute nodes and there is no persistent data on them.

We are highly virtualized, so Rubrik is used to back most of the VMs up. We are running VMware ESXi for our VMs, and application-wise, we are a Microsoft shop so we backup SQL Server, Exchange Server, and Microsoft file shares. We also back up a lot of business data, which is contained outside of that server.

The biggest impact that Rubrik has is that it allows us to have the reliance on the backup, knowing that the data is there and that the ability to restore is there. It provided the safety net we needed to deploy faster. This is because it played a great role in convincing developers and operations to do rapid releases, as opposed to doing it the old way where we didn't have reliable backups. It meant that we had to wrap all the releases in the solid recovery plan in addition to just the rollout. Now, we have the confidence in the backup and can release faster.

Rubrik has saved us time with managing backups in general. For recovery testing, the SLA policies have greatly reduced the time that we have to babysit backups. This is simply because Rubrik put thought into designing their system the right way. Instead of adding a server by creating jobs and creating schedules on top of the jobs, you're just dropping them into an SLA and all of the legwork is done for you, so adding the systems is easier.

The fact that they're SLAs, I don't need to go through the job log and analyze it to figure out why there was a job failure. Similarly, I don't need to look into the impact of the failure. This is because I know that if the machine is protected within SLA guidelines, I will get an alert in case of a problem with a machine. In this case, it means that I need to act and somebody needs to take a look at it. Essentially, it has reduced a lot of repetitive babysitting steps that don't really produce any business value.

We have never had a problem such that Rubrik has saved us downtime. But, it's certainly a great thing to have this additional safety net, which is a reliable backup solution. Everything we have is redundant, so even there is a hardware failure, another piece of hardware kicks in. We won't rely on Rubrik specifically for disaster recovery, but we do rely on it for business continuity. If for whatever reason, both of our data centers lose power or lose internet, or are inaccessible, then Rubrik will help us rebuild the environment. What we don't rely on it for is daily disaster recovery.

As we moved away from our previous solutions, using Rubrik has improved our overall efficiency. These days, we rarely have to do anything with the systems. Most of the time when we have to resolve an issue with the backup it's because the target system has become unavailable or has been taken offline for maintenance. It may also be the case that we have another restore request. These are the only two reasons that a restore might be delayed. It is not the same as we had with NetBackup, where we had to update the agent and software. We don't have to do anything of that nature. Backup is now pretty much gone from our weekly schedule.

The most valuable features are reliability and programmability. We have a great success rate for backups with Rubrik and because of the ease of automating tasks, we also run periodical restores to check the quality of the backups.

Rubrik makes it really simple to automate the restore task, which is important because I don't care about the backup. I care about the restores, and Rubrik did a great job of assuring restore reliability.

Our time spent on recovery testing has improved simply because we're able to automate it. It saves us between two and four hours per week, whether it is simply adding a new machine or going through the logs and seeing what failed.

We don't do recovery on a daily or weekly basis. We receive between two and four recovery requests per month. Because it is mostly manual stuff, it is comparable to the old system if we're talking about restoring something within a two-week timeframe when it's still on disk. However, if we're talking about restoring from the cloud versus restore from tape, the timeframes are not even on the same level. This is simply because we use the offsite storage for tapes, so sometimes the restore task from tape will take weeks.

The web interface is easy to navigate and pleasant to look at.

The SLA-based policy has simplified our data protection operations tremendously. It goes back to caring about restores instead of backups, and the fact that it allows me to easily drop systems into the SLAs greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to set up the system for backup.

It allows me to create a protection policy and while it's running, I know that the systems that I've assigned to that policy are being protected accordingly. If that is not happening then I get an alert or a notification telling me that the systems are outside of the protection horizon. It's a great approach.

The archival functionality is impressive. Just by eliminating reliance on the tape technology, it's greatly improved the rate of successful restores that we were able to perform. In two and a half years, I can't remember a case where we couldn't locate data that was backed up using Rubrik.

We have not needed to use the ransomware recovery function but I know that Rubrik backups are essentially immutable. Even if an intrusion does happen, we'll be able to restore the data quickly.

I have used the rapid restore functionality and I noticed that on many occasions, I was able to mount a virtual machine or database on the Rubrik cluster itself. So, I know its high-speed connectivity options are excellent and support VMware well.

With the previous version, we had to do some Python scripting because the API was better and more developed than the PowerShell support. However, with the new version, it seems that PowerShell covers all of the functionality that we need, which is great, especially because we are a Windows shop.

The restore success rate is very good. I don't care so much about improving the time spent on the resource. Rather, it's the success rate. At this point, we have a 100% success rate, which was definitely not the case with any prior system that I've used.

I would love to be able to just get from the dashboard to a file that I need, or a system that I need. I believe that right now, there's the ability to search by system name, and then it will take you to the system. It would be great if I can reduce the number of clicks that I need to take in order to do a restore, or maybe to a system and the file, or maybe just directly to the file. It would be like continuous integration with PowerShell.

As we go into the Cloud in addition to Polaris, I would love to see a future where I can back up pieces of the Cloud, perhaps ARM templates or Azure Active Directories from the Cloud to on-prem. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but just as the Cloud becomes more popular and used on a daily basis, I would love to have just a single pane of glass to provide visibility into the backups.

I have been using Rubrik for approximately three and a half years.

In addition to just great recovery rates, we haven't had any unforeseen outages with Rubrik itself, due to hardware failure or anything like that. Even the Rubrik software upgrades are non-disruptive in the sense that because they're multiple nodes in the chassis as the upgrade happens, Rubrik never actually goes down and can continue doing the backups on the nodes that are not directly affected by the upgrade.

This is a well-designed product, so adding more space is as easy as adding another chassis. It is great functionality because adding more storage is like adding more bandwidth and more connectivity. That's a great design.

We are a fairly small organization, so probably five to six people have access, and there are probably three or four who use it. We centralize Rubrik to our IT systems and IT help desk, so it's all managed internally. There is enough flexibility to extend it to developers and give certain people rights to certain restores. It's just that the workload is so light that it doesn't make sense for us to constantly keep training users on how to operate it. By the time they need to perform a restore, they'll forget it all and have to come back to the help desk anyway.

If in the next version of Rubrik they announce new ways to back up Azure or Office 365, I would jump on the offer. The main driver for us to purchase additional Rubrik units would be if we were constrained on storage. As of right now, we have sized it correctly so we have plenty of storage to satisfy the SLAs for the data that they need to store in-house.

If our data consumption or data storage requirements increase, and we suddenly need more storage for data protection, we will look into adding units. At this point, we are properly sized for the performance.

Our experience with technical support has been great. We had a couple of questions in the beginning, so we interacted about two and a half years ago. You would email them and would get somebody from there, without having to exchange many emails.

They will do the upgrades for you, so lately, probably over the past year, the only interaction we have had with support is when we needed to do an upgrade. It's a great experience where you just open up a support ticket with them, they open up the secure remote channel, and they come in to complete the upgrade.

Prior to Rubrik, we used Veritas NetBackup for the backup and CommVault for the tape system. We switched to Rubrik because our success rate was poor. The restore rate was horrendous, especially when we had to go to the tape system. it was hovering around a 75% success rate.

The initial setup is extremely straightforward. We went through the exercises and were provided configuration details that were required from us. I think that they were as simple as supplying IP configuration information. Then, once they assembled all of the racks and wires, the Rubrik technician showed up, configured the system, and it was all done in probably less than 20 hours in total.

Because we're virtual, it meant that our implementation strategy was simple. Essentially, once the Rubrik system had been configured, all we had to do was to point it to VMware vSphere vCenter servers and from there, it automatically picked up all of the virtual machines that we had. Then, it was just a question of assigning them to SLAs and removing them from the old backup system. That final piece is not included in the 20 hours because 20 hours was just to get the Rubrik running. But, it was extremely easy to integrate.

We worked directly with Rubrik to help with the deployment.

For maintenance, you really don't need more than two persons, and that's for redundancy purposes. You can have a single person manage terabytes of backups.

By now, we have probably made the money back in reduced support costs. Beyond that, we don't value this type of product by how much money it produces. Simply, the compliance requirements come with steep fines and other repercussions if they are not adhered to. Because this product gives us assurance in our ability to restore data if needed, it satisfies our compliance requirements.

You get what you pay for. Rubrik was probably the most expensive solution but in the long run, it's justified by the value of the data that it protects. We were able to make a case that it's a good investment.

They have a very straightforward pricing model.

We evaluated a couple of other solutions, but Rubrik offered the best appliance. We looked at products from Veeam and the present solutions from Veritas and others, but it looked like Rubrik was the most modern solution.

I am familiar with the predictive search but we're not employing it. Usually, when we need to restore, we have to restore the whole machine or we know the location of the file or data that was deleted.

We've considered using the Polaris SaaS-based framework as we're looking into leveraging the cloud a little bit more. Polaris is definitely on our radar, but we're not using it in our day-to-day operations.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using it for three years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're using it for the backup of our virtual machines or VMs for the cloud. It is also for the standalone. We have a connector with vCenter, and we are using it for the virtual machine backup.

It is on-premise. We have two Rubrik. We are using one as a standalone, and we are also using one Rubrik in our private cloud. It is an on-premise VMware cloud.

We haven't upgraded the software in the last one year. We do the security patch updates and hardware firmware upgrades, but at the software level, we haven't done any major updates. We are using the same version.

It provides cost savings. Cost-wise, it is beneficial for us. We are protecting more than 3 petabytes of data daily, and we have more than 3,000 plus servers. 

Rubrik is cheap, and you get good performance. 

Its implementation is easy and doesn't take much time. Scalability and high availability are also there.

NAS backup can be improved. We have a NAS share, and we were not able to configure that with Rubrik. We found a solution from Dell EMC called Avamar that has an accelerator for NAS backup. The NAS backup is quicker in Avamar with the accelerator hardware, but in Rubrik, it is time-consuming.

Its reporting can be improved. Sometimes, I need to create reports to know whether something is available or not, how much frontend data is being protected, etc. Rubrik gives a lot of things in the report, which can be confusing. It isn't very easy to get reports. It shows all the backup, index, replication, and everything else in one report. So, I have to export, filter, and then do the calculations. If they can improve these things, it would be good. We are managing services for our customers, and every month, I have to provide reports for different types of KPIs and SLAs. We need to provide KPIs to the customers in terms of:

• How many clients are we protecting?
• How much frontend data are we protecting?
• How much recovery are we doing?
• How many recovery jobs and backup jobs have we performed?
• How many ad-hoc jobs have we performed?
• How many new backup clients are we adding every month?

This is the information that I have to give to the customer to show the effort that we are putting in, but currently, we have to do a lot of manual tasks and customizations. If there is a way to generate such reports, it would be helpful. 

By default, it shows only weekly reports. There should also be monthly and quarterly reports.

We have been using Rubrik for the last one year.

Its performance and stability are fine. We haven't faced any issues in the past year.

It is scalable. We can add a node and scale it. 

In terms of its usage, it is used every day. Currently, we have only five users because we also have other solutions. We also have Dell EMC Avamar and Networker. 

We have been using EMC for the past seven or eight years, and we have recently started moving to Rubrik. When I calculate the ROI for both, there is a lot of difference, and that's why we started using Rubrik.

We are using Rubrik only for the VMware backup. VMware works fine with Dell EMC Avamar and Rubrik. Our environment also has SAP HANA, Oracle, SQL, but we are not using Rubrik for these. We use Dell EMC NetWorker for these.

It was not complex. It was very fast, which is also a good thing about Rubrik. It just takes one day for hardware mounting and connectivity. In three days, we completed everything, including the integration between vCenters.

It was implemented in-house. 

Its maintenance is minimal. Usually, for patching, we take support, and our staff works with the support. Currently, I have three to four people working for the data protection part. They work with Rubrik, and they also work with Avamar.

There is just one cost, and it includes software and hardware. So, everything is included. 

It is better than other solutions in terms of cost. We also have Dell EMC Avamar in our environment, and we have to pay for the hardware and data domain. We also have to pay for the software license for the data protection suite. So, based on my calculations, I find Rubrik cheaper, and we are also getting good performance.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. Technically and operationally, everything is fine. In terms of implementation and cost also, it is fine, but its reporting needs to be improved.

It was a test environment for testing the backups.

Rubrik is a little better than Cohesity.

Rubrik, when compared to Cohesity, Dell, and Veritas, was the best of the four.

For the most part, it is easy to use.

It is secure.

The dashboard and user interface could be improved to make them more user-friendly.

Rubrik was last used six months ago.

We had some stability issues. We encountered some bugs and glitches.

I recall having to go to the lab because we couldn't get in from the outside, we had to gain access from within, and I had a network.

Rubrik is easy to scale.

We had a team of about seven users when we were working with Rubrik.

Technical support was pretty good. They were excellent.

I have also worked with Cohesity, Dell, and Veritas. Cohesity was one of the simplest. It is more user-friendly.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The Rubrik, team assisted us with the installation and the updates.

I would rate Rubrik a nine out of ten.

We use Rubrik for backup and recovery.

Rubrik is critical for our organization because it keeps our data safe. It helps us meet all of our POs and TOs.

The most valuable features of Rubrik are the restoration and ease of use.

The solution could improve by having fewer VM Stuns.

I have been using Rubrik for approximately three years.

We have recently scaled the solution and it went well.

We have an administrator and people who do the restorations that use the solution.

I rate Rubrik support a five out of five.

We were previously using Avamar, but we switch because it was too expensive.

The initial installation was very simple. 

I would create the ease of installation a five out of five.

We used a VAR for the implementation and our experience was excellent.

We haven't actually calculated the ROI, but there's a good return on investment.

I would rate the ROI of Rubrik a four out of five.

We are on an annual license to use Rubrik and it is priced well.

I would rate the price of Rubrik a four out of five.

We evaluated other options before, such as Cohesity. We choose Rubrik because it was overall a better solution.

If you are wanting to implement this solution I would recommend doing your homework and evaluating other solutions.

I rate Rubrik a nine out of ten.