Rubrik Reviews

Rubrik is for ransomware and stuff like that. Rubrik Polaris is an application as a service. So it's in the cloud and the version is V 2021817-9.

Rubrik Backup and Recovery and Polaris also help in case of recovery to identify ransomware and vulnerabilities.

We use it to back up our virtual environment, which consists of VMware, and we have some Cisco HyperFlex appliances there. It's an all-in-one appliance for storage.

We just actually started using Polaris just a couple of weeks ago. We primarily use it for reporting. We are not using Polaris for backing up cloud environments. We don't use Rubrik to backup our cloud environment.

Rubrik has reduced the time spent on recovery testing with recovery principles, especially the environments. It's hard to say how much it has reduced the time it takes to recover because if it's a single file, it's just faster to do it with Rubrik because it's easier. If it's a VM, it's pretty much almost instant recovery. On average it's three to five times faster.

It has also saved us time managing backups. It's pretty stable. So it sends us a report if something goes wrong, then you get a report. You don't really need to manually monitor this software over time. If something happens, you'll get an error and you'll get an email notification and then address it. We found the product pretty stable if it's configured correctly. So it has reduced management time.

Downtime for our production data has also been reduced because the recovery speed is faster and our outage is shorter. So we found that it definitely does improve our uptime for our production data. It has improved uptime 20 to 30%.

Our team's overall productivity goes faster and it's improved because we need less management. People can concentrate on tasks other than just babysitting data.

We get very good reporting in Rubrik, also. You have very good visibility into your backup. You can also define different levels of backup, for example, image-based backup. Live Mount is also a good feature to get recovery. 

It allows for easy integration. We use NetApp, so it integrates with NetApp snapshots. It is very easy to set up and start backing up. You don't need to do custom configurations. It's simple and straightforward compared to traditional backup solutions. It's easy to adapt the user interface and easy to navigate. It has good reporting. It also has nice monitoring. My dashboard is also very good.

The SLA-based policy automation is a good way to create different policies, such as retention, frequency of backups, or retention of backups based on the data owners' need for protection. We create different SLAs based on our requirements for data. And then when we need them, we find the appropriate SLA and just attach them to this SLA which makes it easy. You don't need to create a policy for each resource. You basically group your resources under the SLA.

The Archival feature is very good. Rubrik requires you to have at least one local copy on the Rubrik break, but then you can archive either to basically any storage. They also integrated clouds like Azure and AWS, where you can archive to a different tier. So you can apply archiving to F3 for something that you may need for faster recovery.

We, fortunately, didn't need to use Rubrik for ransomware. We also own Rubrik Polaris Radar, which creates a report and looks into our environment and any suspicious activities that could be related to ransomware so we can check right away. And if it's a real vulnerability, we can address it in a timely manner. We didn't have to do anything to recover from ransomware yet, but I feel like we are better protected now with Rubrik Polaris Radar.

The Polaris piece could use improvement. When you get a report and you have events that are suspicious, you cannot drill down and find out why it's suspicious. You only know it's suspicious, but you don't know the root cause. Other than that, everything works well.

Scalability is very good. As your need for backup capacity increases, you just add more to the same cluster. So it's all managed from one interface. You don't need to manage each process separately. It's easy to scale up. And you can replicate to the outside. 

Our environment is about 150 terabytes.

I would rate their technical support at least a nine out of ten. The support is very good. Nobody's perfect but it's very good.

I use a lot of different backups. For example, NetBackup from Symantec. The main difference between that and Rubrik is that Rubrik is policy-based, so it's easy to apply.

NetApp is very hard to configure. You would need a full-time employee just to manage and configure backups. With Rubrik, it's pretty much plug-and-play, so that's a big difference. And it works both in a physical and virtual environment, so that's another advantage.

The physical installation of appliances takes one day. And then configuration takes maybe another day but it also depends on how many data sources you have and if your policy is defined in advance. Sometimes we have to wait for data owners to define the requirement for backing up. Within one, two days, you can set it up and get it going.

The safety of our data is the main concern. We don't see a direct return on investment, but having our data protected is peace of mind. If it's lost and you can recover it quickly, it's a big value. So it's hard to value a return of investment on the backup software until you do a big restore. We do some small restores, and so far we see the value of the program.

The product is not cheap, the pricing is pretty high. The product is good, but the price could be lower. I wish it would be lower so we could back in more stuff. I wouldn't say it's great value as far as price is related.

We use the Evergreen Subscription Purchasing Program.

I think Rubrik is a very good backup solution. The only thing is that it's not cheap, but it is easy to understand and implement with great support. It's more expensive, but you don't need that many man-hours to work on your backup solution. It equates with some other product pricing, but I would recommend it. It works well, it's pretty reliable, stable, and easy to use. I don't see any negatives in Rubrik, only positives. They work to improve the product constantly as well. 

I would rate Rubrik a nine out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

I have been using Rubrik for six months. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The primary use case for Rubrik is backup and restore and as an archival system. We use it for backup and restore for virtual machines, managed volumes that are mounted and which we use for snapshots from Rubrik to endpoint devices, NAS shares from our Isilon system, as well as SQL databases, Oracle Databases, and Windows and Linux. We may have some failover cluster Windows shares going to it. It's for backups and restores of pretty much everything. It works really well in concert with Pure Storage technology. We have a really large Pure Storage environment and they play really well together.

The solution is on-prem and it's protecting environments that are on-premises exclusively at this point, although we have plans to push towards the cloud. Most of it is virtual but I'd be surprised if we didn't have at least half-a-dozen physical machines connected to it. 

I don't think that we have had an instance where we needed to recover en masse, like from a ransomware attack, but we have disaster recovery in production, and as part of our strategy we back up things that are also in test. Because it's test, sometimes things get configured wrong, and that's the whole point of the test. You figure out what works for you and the company and what solves the problem. But you break things in the process sometimes. It's really great to be able to do all of your testing and all of your work in testing without a great fear of really losing data or losing progress very much. We've had phone calls where they say, "Hey, I need XYZ restored, or I need this entire drive restored, or I need this entire VM restored." At the click of a button, five seconds later, it's back. It took longer for them to tell me what they needed back than it did to get it returned.

We try to run a disaster recovery test at least once a year. We want to make sure things are working, especially since here in Louisiana we have hurricanes. There could be a storm that comes in and we have to migrate our data and everything. The great thing is, we've got our data in both our production data center and our DR center. We're frequently doing those tests, we're frequently replicating between our different data centers. We do get a report about the replication status. With the exception of that, I don't think we really do much restore testing. But when we have restored, it has always worked. I never restored things before we had Rubrik so it's hard to know whether it reduces the time spent on recovery testing.

I know from my previous scenario in higher education, if the user on the phone said, "I know exactly the file and directory I need restored and I know exactly the day that I need it restored from," then I could probably do it in under 20 minutes. With Rubrik, I can do that in about 35 seconds, if I am already logged in. And in my previous occupation, that 20 minutes was only if the file was actually backing up. Frequently, we encountered issues where the file wasn't even backing up. Sometimes there were issues that we didn't get an email about and, as a result, we weren't backing things up. We only found out things weren't getting backed up because somebody needed some data. Overall, it's a huge reduction in time, if we're going from 35 minutes down to a minute.

And if Rubrik doesn't back up, we know it. If there's some issue where a system goes down and it can't take a snapshot, we know it. And that's good. It's not that I want to get those emails, but those are the emails that make you confident in your system. It has detected a problem and it immediately lets me know about it. And it tells me, "This is exactly the problem." I know exactly what I'm looking for.

It's great whenever I get a call that says, "Hey, I need this restored," because it's like I get to be a superhero. The person on the other end thinks their stuff is gone. They know, "Oh yeah, we have backups. And they might work, unless something happened and we don't have them." Whenever you give them their file back, and it's the last version that they edited, and their work is safe, it's really awesome. That's our validation. I have a lot of confidence in the system.

Regarding my team's overall productivity, here's the thing that's really great about Rubrik. It's really great that I could have someone who doesn't do this for a living. Provided that permissions were set up right, I could have a normal user, who is in charge of just his own data, go in and participate in restore operations. Rubrik is that much of a seamless, easy-to-use system. That's not just productivity for my team, a team full of people who do this every day. Users know they don't even have to ask. They can log in, they can get to what they're looking for because it's very easy to find, and they can restore it. Even though I may be one of the primary people to configure and deal with the nuts and bolts of it, that doesn't mean I'm the only one who can actually restore and get files back.

There's also the aspect that, whenever they commit a change or do something, as long as we're within our SLA snapshot time, they know that their changes are secure and that their changes will be there. So if they need to walk back or change something, they know they'll be able to. Again, confidence and trust in the system is fantastic.

The restore and backup agent is really great. It takes the load off of vSphere or vCenter or any of our ESXi hosts. It makes things just a dream to manage.

The fact that the API is so available to us with the playground — there's an internal and public playground — is also valuable. We can write API calls — and although I'm sure there's a way we could hurt the data — we write those calls with a lot of certainty that we won't be destroying anything. We write these API calls using really easy mechanisms and generate automation a lot faster. We can integrate into other systems that might not be as easy with other solutions. We can integrate Rubrik into the systems very easily because they give us the tools to do so.

Also, the web interface is really great. The design, from a user-experience standpoint, is really straightforward and easy to use. Sometimes you go to websites and you can immediately tell, "This is going to be a pain to use." The buttons are in weird placements or when you click on something it doesn't load very quickly. I don't know if Rubrik got it right on the first try or if they went through a lot of user testing, or maybe they hired some people that did user experience in the past. But they nailed it. Usually, from the very first panel, the dashboard that you land on after login, you've got most of your functionality right around where you need it to be. You've got your new items on the left, you've got your support on the top right. Nothing really seems out of place or just stuck in someplace.

Generally, within three or four clicks, I can get anywhere I need to be, whether that's restoring a snapshot or creating a new host. It's really fast. And from a technical standpoint, you can get to the interface from any of the nodes within the Rubrik cluster. You don't just explicitly have to go to the cluster host's name at the top level. You can go to any of the nodes that make up the cluster. So let's just say networking is hard, systems sometimes are hard and things can break. That's just a thing that happens with computers, they're not perfect — I wouldn't have a job if things were perfect. Let's just say something happens where you don't have access to the cluster. You can go to any of the cluster resources, any of the nodes in the cluster, and you can access virtually the same interface.

That's awesome, because usually, in the past, if something was down and it affected the cluster endpoint, the primary website, you would have to SSH in, you would have to go into command line, and reboot the server. There's no need to do that here. You have to lose your entire environment for it to go down.

In terms of SLA-based policy automation, I don't know what they were doing before Rubrik. I have to imagine there was a similar SLA system. For me, personally, I had a very static, flat rate of four weeks and that was it. If I wanted to have a separate set of SLAs, a separate 15-day SLA or a separate 20-day SLA, I had to stand up a completely separate version of that system and point things to that. Instead of having multiple SLAs in the same system, I had multiple systems that were exactly one SLA, which is a big management headache. There's a lot of overhead to that. You have to have another machine to run it, you have another cluster to run it. I don't know if this is a normal thing in the industry or if it's just a thing that all of a sudden I've seen, but of course you would do it this way. Everyone should do it this way.

For me, it was a really big eye-opener, being able to say for each resource, "You're going to be a 15-day at this time. That's every snapshot that you're going to have." It's continuous protection. It's really awesome that I get to work with a product that does that and does it well. I saw videos when I was learning about Rubrik. Other places have these features too, but they might not work as well. Frequently they don't. That's really one of the big selling points of the system.

Rubrik's archival functionality is a no-brainer. It doesn't require a ton of thought. I don't have to over-engineer different policies to validate what I think it's doing. If it says it's doing it, it's doing it, and it's really easy to click a button and say, "Now it's done." It's a very convenient piece of tech and I absolutely love it.

Regarding API support for integration with other solutions, we have not used it directly with any of the other hardware except Pure Storage. Pure Storage and Rubrik really go together well. We use a batch management control, which is like a job-controller. It's a modern solution, but it doesn't feel like a modern solution. The developers of it went in a different way, so it accepts command line and PowerShell, but with Rubrik's PowerShell modules and their API at a raw level, we're able to integrate it into pretty much anything. We're able to control when and where snapshots fire off and how to lock the different volumes to write- and read-only, depending on what we want to do. We're able to control that with our seemingly legacy — it's not actually legacy — system, even though there's not a direct integration.

It's the same thing with Isilon. Via a script mentality, and in concert with Adam Fox over at Rubrik, we're able to work with him and push all of our Isilon endpoints, all of our network shares from Isilon, into Rubrik, without having to go through the GUI. In our case, we had quite a lot of Isilon hosted storage. We were able to push that to Rubrik relatively seamlessly and simply because they had an API out there for us to use.

We have a lot of DBAs who are interested in Rubrik because, whenever you're a database administrator, I can't imagine that you'd have a lot of fun. You're always worried about mitigating loss. You have your database, and your replication of your database, and your backups for your database, and additional backups for your database, and then you need validation on those backups. The great thing is that Rubrik does most of that. It's not replication for databases, but it backs up the database and it's very seamless. It's very fast.

There are different settings that you can have on those backups to get a varying range of SLAs, where it's up-to-the-minute, or day or hour. You can get that continuous data protection, which is really great.

I joke around, every time we meet our SE, and say they could use a dark theme for the user experience. Everything else has a dark theme now, so it'd be cool if it had a dark theme. 

But on the serious side, I have a personal want which might not necessarily make sense with Rubrik as a company or Rubrik as a software, but it would be really nice if they could also handle things like item-level backups and restores of Active Directory objects and DNS and DCP objects.

In Active Directory there's a recycling bin where something goes if you delete it. I don't know if it's there for a static amount of time, like 90 days, or if it's until we hold 1,000 objects, so if you delete more things, the oldest ones go from the recycling bin. It would be really nice to have an additional layer of convenience, where if it's been in Active Directory for at least a day, and we're within our snapshot time, in addition to the machine itself, we have the actual objects in the Active Directory database so we can back that up. And similarly for DNS: all the records, all the zones, DHCP.

It would also be really great for DSS if they could somehow integrate it with Microsoft's technologies at a modular level. In general, I would like to see more integration with Microsoft at an item level. It already backs up the machine itself. We have the virtual machine which contains the database with DNS or the DHCP or Active Directory, but the restore operations, from a bare-metal restore like that, is technically very cumbersome. I don't know if it would just be a lot of built-in PowerShell scripting where it exports the data, saves that export in Rubrik somehow, and then imports it back in using a reverse method, but I think it would be really helpful if it could.

At one point I thought it would be really great to use it almost like SEPM where you could have modules or files where, instead of restoring back to its original location, you could distribute it to all of your restore points. I've walked back on that somewhat. I think that's a little too outside of the focus for Rubrik.

I personally have been using Rubrik for almost five months. It was deployed before I was working at my place of occupation. I used to work in higher education and I did the backups and the disaster recovery at that organization, amongst other things. When I came onboard at my present occupation, they said, "Here's the backup you're going to use, here's the system that we bought into, it's this thing called Rubrik." I said, "Cool. You've seen one system, you've seen them all. They all work." I believe the company has been using it for about a year.

Rubrik is incredibly stable. I'm getting out of that mode of thinking with Rubrik, "Well, maybe it won't work this time. Maybe it'll be down." It's never been down, it's never been inaccessible. If I can't connect to it, I'm typing the URL wrong. That's it.

We had other systems that are homegrown systems or even that were purchased. I don't know if there were technical aspects that were outside of our control, or that we just aren't mitigating or managing very well, with them. But as far as Rubrik is concerned, I've never had an issue accessing that on-prem system — and that's true even for our DR system which is technically on-prem but "over there," very far away. That includes nodes, the cluster. It's just been very good.

We have a lot of Rubrik, a lot of "bricks". If we needed more, we'd just buy more. The horizontal scaling is really great. I don't think we need anything immediately. But I could definitely imagine a moment in the past — not that I know that this happened — where we had ten nodes instead of the 50-something nodes we now have at each site, and we needed more and we put in more. I could totally see it all just working. It would just all of a sudden get better.

If we were ever pressed and at a point where we need something better, we needed more, I would imagine Rubrik would have a solution for us and it would work 100 percent. Whether that would be to PoC some new hardware and verify that it would actually improve our situation, or tweak a setting, or do a site survey to figure out what we're using and how to help, they would either get what we are using right now to work better, or they would figure out what we need to make it better moving forward.

That's scalability in a lot of ways. That's technical scalability in being consistent and stable and being able to improve and evolve. And that's stability and scalability and not having to plan your business processes around what should be a no-brainer issue. It's something that shouldn't drive your business. It should allow your business to be driven in whatever direction it needs to go. It should be something that just works, and so far I've seen it just works.

We have over 2,000 employees, and every one of those employees has some form of a computer and some have multiple: a laptop, or a laptop and a virtual machine, or just a virtual machine, or a laptop and two virtual machines. It's a big environment. We have hundreds of Windows Servers and about 100 Linux servers, if not more. We have pretty extensive Microsoft SQL environments which are either always-on clusters or a combination of always-on clusters and available clusters, and then we have some Oracle Databases as well.

I don't remember the exact number of what we're currently supporting in Rubrik, but I know it is a lot. We've integrated it in such a way — and this is a fairly normal process, but it's great — that whenever we put a machine online, part of the workflow is to get it to back up into Rubrik. Whenever we decommission things, it's to remove those backups 90 days after we remove the physical or virtual server. We keep backups X number of months after we remove the machine, just in case, depending on what our data retention policy is.

It's ingrained. We're invested. We made the jump.

While this might not count as a "tool," the support methodology with Rubrik is really interesting. When we need to do anything that is "invasive," if I have a question about how many upgrade-blocking things are in place, I open a support window, a ticket, and usually within ten minutes I'm contacted by someone, a real person, not just an automated system, at Rubrik.

It's really good. In my previous job to this one, I never really had an experience where the first response that I got back wasn't just an automated, robo-caller saying, "We've received your ticket, we will call you in a moment," and then two days later they would call. With Rubrik, you do get an email saying, "We've received your ticket and someone's going to call you." But within ten minutes, usually, and very rarely within any longer than 30 minutes, there is a real person on the phone calling me, who knows my name and is very aware of the situation. They're not asking me for a ton of information that I've already given in the ticket. They're really top-notch. And the support is integrated really well into the product.

That's not to say that we need support because things are broken. The support is there as an aid, as a tool for us. 

We upgraded a month ago to the version we're on. We're planning on upgrading to the latest version, which I think is 5.03. The great thing is that we're really close with support. They work well with us. We don't upgrade to beta or anything like that, but whenever something big is coming down, they'll usually let us know. We'll talk to them about it and they'll tell us "Hey, this is a cool thing that maybe you guys can utilize."

We replaced Avamar with Rubrik and it assumed the exact same role that Avamar had. I never got to use Avamar. It was decommissioned before I got to my current company.

When I worked in higher education, because we didn't have a lot of money to buy solutions, a lot of it was open-source. So I was the support and I was the deployment and I was the debugger and I was the guy that had to code all the integration. It was hard for me to have a vision of, and architect, how we were going to use things. Back then, we needed to use something and I needed to make it happen.

So in a lot of ways, Rubrik is my first big, differentiating factor in backup and restore software. It's not like we weren't able to do it at my previous organization, but this is a completely different realm. It's a totally different level with Rubrik. I'm not saying that Avamar wouldn't have been a similar feeling. But I hear what other people on the team who were using Avamar before are saying, and I get the feeling that Rubrik is leaps and bounds better in terms of validating that the backups actually happened and that they're there.

In terms of deployment of the solution, it was vendor-aided. Rubrik helped through our SEs. If I had to guess, it would probably be less than half-a-dozen people who were a big part of the deployment, data center access and data center deployment notwithstanding. Some people had to go and plug and rack things.

We aren't interested in lagging behind as far as updates go. We're pretty good about updating to the latest version. The only reason we haven't done so right now is because it's in use. We continue to use it and the organization I work for is big. There are a lot of teams using it. So it's hard finding the time in the day where we can disconnect everything, upgrade the system, and then reconnect everything. That's on our side where we're trying to juggle all the teams that are making use of the product.

I believe our company has seen return on investment by going with Rubrik, although I can't talk about it in detail. I'm not a finance guy. But from the way I hear people talk about previous products we were using, and from my personal experience of wasted time in managing and deploying and supporting free or open-source software, I believe there is ROI. We've definitely done whatever was necessary to make the cost worthwhile.

I remember hearing that we purchased a multi-year, contractual agreement. I don't know if we purchased the hardware outright or if it's a lease-to-own scenario.

My advice would be in the form of a question. If you have the money to purchase Rubrik, the real question is do you want success? Do you want it to work? Because if you want it to work and you want it to be easy — I don't know if Rubrik has won awards for support and service, although I feel like they should have — if you want that support for the few times that you need it, then you go with Rubrik.

It's a really good, seamless system. It's a no-brainer, sometimes. It just works.

I met up with them at VMworld and I actually got to talk to one of the people who was writing the PowerShell modules that I was using for an automation piece that I was writing. I got to ask that person, developer-to-developer, why did you make this decision? I asked a couple of very in-depth questions, and I don't get to do that with a lot of other companies, the companies that are just a logo or just a payment box and a data center. I don't feel Rubrik is a payment box and a data center. It's more than that, it's bigger than that, and that's really good. There are communities out there for Rubrik and I can speak with other developers and other teams that have implemented Rubrik, and that's awesome. It's not a support portal and it's not a place where you go to air your grievances. You go there to have fun, you go there to learn.

I don't know that I've ever used a product that's been quite like it. There are a couple of products that are similar. You definitely get a lot out of Pure Storage, which is very much the same thing, but that's storage, not backup and restore. The advice I would give is: It's not charity software, it's not "for-free" software. It does cost, but what you're buying is a solution that will actually work. It will carry whatever weight you want to give it. And you're also getting the team that helped make it great.

We have not needed to use Rubrik's ransomware recovery yet. Thankfully we've been spared from having to utilize that component. But when I was at VMworld 2019 recently and I was watching a class on ransomware recovery, it was one of those things where thought, "Wow, I didn't even really know we had this." But we totally have this. We have Rubrik, and this is neat. I ended up talking to one of our SEs about it after the fact, and he said, "Yeah, well, you haven't needed it and hopefully you never will."

I believe some of our application developer teams are using Rubrik. They might not realize they're using it though, because a lot of the integration we put in is to back up the machines that they do work on, but they don't realize that we're backing them up. That's kind of sneaky. We're devious like that. We try to protect our users even from themselves sometimes.

For day-to-day maintenance there are only two or three people. I'm one of them, and I have another member on my team who is involved. We also have one of the database administrators who plays a big role in it. My passion, and where I fit perfectly in the team, is doing a lot of scripting. I'm a general-purpose solutions engineer with a focus in PowerShell, Active Directory, and Microsoft integration.

I don't like typically giving tens, because that says there's no room for improvement. But functionally, it's a 9.99999, which rounds up to a ten.

My customers use Rubrik for both backup software and hardware solutions. Unlike many backup solutions that only provide software, Rubrik offers an integrated platform, including hardware and software.

Rubrik's instant recovery capability has significantly boosted operational efficiency for our customers. It stands out as the only solution that allows us to seamlessly start up around two hundred virtual machines directly from the backup without encountering any issues.

In a bank implementation, we started with ten nodes and easily expanded to 30 as the organization grew. This shows Rubrik's scalability in supporting the organization's increasing needs.

What I like the most about Rubrik is its user-friendly interface.

While Rubrik is consistently innovative, I would like to see more openness for partners to access and assist in system management. Currently, access is limited, often handled by Rubrik personnel, likely due to security concerns.

I have been working with Rubrik for three years.

We have not had any stability issues with Rubrik.

Rubrik is highly scalable, and the process is straightforward. Adding nodes is easy, even during network changes, with no downtime required.

Rubrik's technical support is excellent. They handle issues efficiently, and if escalation is needed, they manage it well. I would rate them as a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup process for Rubrik is very straightforward and it primarily involves networking configurations.

Deploying Rubrik was simple for us. We check and ensure correct IP configurations and VLANs. Network issues are usually the only hiccups. The implementation is smooth, needing minimal resources. On average, without upgrades, it takes about an hour for installation and setup.

Maintaining Rubrik is straightforward. With its four-node architecture, upgrades, and maintenance are easy as it handles updates by rebooting nodes individually.

I recommend Rubrik as a good solution, but it is crucial to work with knowledgeable partners for effective implementation. Understanding how to use it is key. Overall, I would rate Rubrik as an eight out of ten.

Using Rubrik for data backup and recovery management in our organization has been a seamless experience. It is a new and user-friendly product. It significantly reduces the learning curve and allows us to quickly grasp its functionalities.  

We used Rubrik for business continuity in a bank. In a demo, we started up a hundred virtual machines in just 12 minutes, highlighting its quick and reliable performance for uninterrupted business operations.

Rubrik stands out for simplifying data management with an all-in-one solution, serving as both software and backup targets. Unlike Data Domain, which is mainly a storage box, Rubrik is user-friendly and continually improves, making it more adaptable and user-focused. It goes beyond just storage, offering options for data management and recovery.

We use Rubrik for daily VM snapshots at local sites, but it is also used for replication in our DR sites because Rubrik has the ability to run a VM on its hardware in case of a failure.

It has greatly simplified our backup process. We create SLAs inside Rubrik, and it does the rest. For most VMs, there is not a Client to be installed. 

We also like the DR features that Rubrik has. E.g., if our main storage goes down, we can temporarily mount VMs on Rubrik.

The user interface (UI) is great. It is very lightweight and intuitive. 

The Auto-Snapshot SLA feature and recovery time are amazing. It took seven seconds to have a server back up and running in production from a total failure.

There are so many things Rubrik has done right. They need to continue to listen to their customers and what they want/need, not just care about money and the bottom line. If they do, they will continue to grow and be a great product.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

We have had training sessions. We used customer support once, and they resolved the issue immediately.

We previously used EMC Avamar. The reason that we switched was cost, maintenance, and customer support.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

We have installed three Rubrik devices so far. The setup took only two to three hours at each site. We were immediately able to start backing up after the initial setup.  

We used Rubrik for the implementation. They let us know what the requirements were for their product to be successfully installed and implemented. We filled out a worksheet with all the configuration settings. The tech came onsite, and it was done in two to three hours.

To be determined.

The cost was less than our previous provider, and this is a much better product.

We looked into EMC's newest product, Veeam, and Cohesity.

If you are looking for a product that offers backups and DR capabilities, which is easy to use, look no further than Rubrik. I am very satisfied.

We use the solution for backups. We transitioned from Veeam to Rubrik, and we currently have on-premises backups for production and disaster recovery purposes. These backups are clustered between both sites, with 60 appliances used for backup operations.

Rubrik simplifies our data backup and recovery processes significantly. It's very straightforward to use. We start by tagging through VMware, and everything tagged for Rubrik is backed up automatically. Backups are much better and faster because Rubrik takes a full snapshot of the virtual machine. We recently conducted a verification by performing a restore, and even during the restore process, we could bring up the server in less than 10-15 minutes. Additionally, we have set up alerts for sensitive data, which helps us track data. 

We have set up all the alerts for sensitive data. It's not exactly data governance fully, but it does help us to identify those data. The tool helps us to avoid vulnerabilities and any cyber protection issues. For example, if any antivirus or other security measures are on the system, Rubrik flags it immediately, indicating that a backup and an air gap are required. This ensures that no other backups would be impacted if there's an issue with one backup. Additionally, Rubrik comes with live monitoring capabilities, allowing its support team to identify and address any issues immediately. 

The tool's most valuable features are the management of sensitive data, the air gap backup functionality, and the real-time monitoring capabilities. Additionally, the speed and reliability of the platform are also highly beneficial.

Instant recovery with Rubrik has significantly improved our RTOs. The process is much quicker than traditional backups, allowing us to restore backups with minimal downtime.

I hope to see enhancements in areas like data governance and the incorporation of new features in future updates.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the stability of Rubrik as a ten. It meets our requirements and has become our primary backup solution.

The solution is scalable. 

We faced no significant challenges while integrating Rubrik with our IT infrastructure. Their support team was excellent and assisted in the deployment process. Even after deployment, their responsiveness to tickets was impressive, addressing any issues promptly.

Positive

I rate the product's deployment an eight out of ten. 

I rate the tool's pricing a six out of ten. 

We found that Rubrik offered a comprehensive solution with a single appliance that met all our needs without requiring additional services or infrastructure. Other solutions often involved purchasing separate storage, servers, and proxy servers, which could be costly. In terms of cost, while Rubrik initially seemed more expensive, the overall cost was more favorable compared to the multiple components required by other solutions. 

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

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. 

The solution is used for data center, backup, and recovery. Also, two companies are looking for an ERP solution, a Cyber Recovery Vault.

Rubrik can be described as a single solution where most things are integrated, making the aforesaid detail its valuable feature.

Pricing is something that needs to be considered for improvement. Pricing needs improvement when compared with a similar product coming from a Cohesity. The cost side is a bit higher, making the solution costly for our company.

I have been using Rubrik for more than five years. My company functions as a service integrator of Rubrik.

I haven't encountered any bugs or glitches using the solution.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My clients are mostly medium and enterprise-sized businesses.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I still need to get feedback on Rubrik's support. I think that regarding the feedback, we never faced many issues on the support side. Hence, I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I rate the implementation a seven on a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The majority of the deployments, like 80 percent, are done on-premises.

The deployment process takes a maximum of two weeks.

The number of people required for deployment depends on the data volume and the number of clients required. So, generally, we keep two people.

I rate the pricing an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high.

I would definitely recommend the solution to those planning to use it.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.