What needs improvement with Rubrik?

When it comes to Oracle Database or Linux-based machines, it is easy to configure Oracle Database when we are using Linux. With Windows, it is difficult to configure Oracle Database. If the ease of configuration of Oracle Database while using Linux can be made possible with Windows, it will be a great help to the administrators.

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

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

Two areas I would like to see improvement in Rubrik are pricing and localization. The pricing could be more competitive, and having a presence in Spain with local support, sales, and management would enhance accessibility and support for Spanish customers.

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

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

Rubrik could improve in customization options for dashboards. The current lack of flexibility forces a standardized approach, which may not suit every environment. Unlike some competitors, like Commvault, Rubrik's dashboards are not easily customizable. Additionally, more detailed logs and reports would be beneficial, as well as a streamlined support process to reduce the dependency on opening multiple tickets for various issues. One feature I'd like to see added to Rubrik is the ability to manage multiple resources for databases more efficiently. Currently, it is a manual process, going one by one. Also, enhancing the management of SLA domains, especially when dealing with multiple domains, would be beneficial. It is challenging to run group-specific reports, and improvements in this area would enhance usability.

The product’s user interface needs improvement.

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.

The solution's reporting feature is very basic. It needs to be more advanced for detailed reporting.

I want to see more features regarding filtering in the Snapshot Window, as I need to be able to set a filter for specific dates and times. If I want to check an old backup, I must scroll through one or two years of backups to find what I'm looking for. The reporting is another area with room for improvement; it needs to be more detailed and have more options for customization. Nowadays, reporting is primarily automated, so I'd like to see the same from Rubrik.

There could be better reporting and better filtering.

I would like to see more information on encryption with the next release.

It would be nice if they could work on the pricing a bit.

The only thing that can be improved is catering for open source databases because at the moment it doesn't cater for Mongo, MySQL, and Postgres. It has a good database agnostic.

An area of the solution that could be improved is from an analytics point of view, if I had to choose something. From an integration perspective, it's very easy to create integration. They have most things covered well.

It is a lot more expensive than other solutions, but you get what you pay for.

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

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.

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.

We would like to see more support for Hyper-V. They support Hyper-V and it works with our CloudOut, the cloud DR, but they seem to add features for VMware first and Hyper-V gets added second or sometimes several releases after the VMware feature comes out. Seeing more support for Hyper-V would be a plus.

I would like to see Rubrik better integrate with Microsoft Active Directory. Instead of just backing up a full domain controller, I would like the solution to have Active Directory object knowledge so we can restore specific objects in Active Directory versus restoring the whole domain controller.

There is always room for improvement with some shortcuts for the web interface. They could make it even more beautiful. While there is always room for improvement, it is already a great product from a UI point of view. It would be nice if we could do a live mount of the Nutanix AHV VMs, but this is not really an issue on the Rubrik side. This is more an issue on the Nutanix side because they need to share the relevant API to allow Rubrik to do that. I know Rubrik is intensively discussing with Nutanix to solve this problem, or at least to open this functionality to the rest of its customers. That would be nice to have the Nutanix AHV live mount, but this is probably for the future. I know it is on the roadmap, but it is not easy because there are some politics between the two vendors. Today, there is no way to migrate archives from one location to another. This is being evaluated by Rubrik at this time. I know because I am pretty much involved with the Rubrik engineering team as a customer advocate.

The interface is still slightly clunky and has room for improvement. They do work with us whenever we mention anything that needs to be done or anything that we want. We find that bringing up the management interface is a little slow and not as intuitive as we would like, but it's been getting better as it evolves. Rubrik is a somewhat new company, so it needs to become a little more established, and that just comes with time. It's not really too much of a concern or a weakness. It's just something that hasn't happened yet.

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 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.

Looking at how the data is broken down, we can see the total story, but sometimes it's difficult to see how big a particular snapshot is. Across 90 days of snapshots, which one is a particularly large one? Looking at the data holistically could be a lot easier. With the Radar product, it would be helpful if it gave us a bit more insight into the alerts. It might be alerting on an object like this VM, but what particularly on that? A bit more oversight, without having to do digging, is the biggest gap they should be filling now.

The reporting in the dashboard and reporting for extractions both need improvement. I would suggest making them easier to understand and use, not just out-of-the-box. We should also be able to customize them.

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.

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.

The solution would be better if it was cheaper and cost us less to use. The solution could be more user friendly. The current UI could be improved considerably, which would make it more comfortable to navigate. The solution needs Continuous Data, or CDP. It may be that we don't have it because we have an older version. It may be on version 5.2 or 5.3 already. The solution needs to be more secure and needs to better protect against ransomware.

The user interface could be improved, it's pretty rough.

We would like to be able to do granular restores directly from Exchange. Also, more granular management of VM backups would help.

At the time of this review, Rubrik is still missing several components to their Office 365 backup offering. These ideas have been voiced to Rubrik and their product management team. It's been our experience that when our ideas are surfaced to Rubrik, we are brought into a feedback session with Rubrik's product team. We now view Rubrik as a partner in our business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.

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

One of the great things that it offers us is simplicity, but at the same time, it would be great if it had a couple of different features that robust products might have. For example, being able to restore add-calls only, instead of restoring entire files and folders would be helpful. Another feature that the product can improve on is being able to restore Active Directory at a more granular level. For example, it would be good if we could restore actual memberships for users instead of the entire server. In addition, I wish they had more GUI-integrated solutions, instead of PowerShell. I would like that interface to be a little bit more in-depth and to have more features. They're not missing features, because you can do them through PowerShell, but I wish that I could do some of those things more easily through the web interface instead. For example, if you want to pause a single backup system, you can't do that through the web interface. Through the web interface you either pause all the backups or none. But if I do it through PowerShell, I can pause just one system.

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 would like to have a built-in index searching ability of files/system files within the Rubrik interface to determine if a file or item exists, rather than just recovering it, and then doing a search for the file afterwards.

We run Microsoft Exchange on physical servers, and we are looking into simplified physical Microsoft Exchange server backup and restore capabilities. Currently, more properties and methods are exposed via REST API when compared with PowerShell. Improving PowerShell integration would greatly simplify Rubrik management.

* Global management of multiple systems is lacking, as is reporting across multiple installed units. This is presently a development item in the Polaris platform, however the current capabilities do not justify the price tag. * MFA/SAML support to improve security for login to the backup system. * Image-level backup for Azure and AWS with storage held outside of the Azure/AWS account so that if an account breach does occur backups and primary data would not be compromised in a single attack.

We need one system to manage all the Rubrik clusters. We are now looking into Rubrik Polaris as a solution.

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.

I wish it had image-level backups available for Hyper-V 2012. I additionally would like for it to implement some of the functions that Veeam Cloud Connect has so that I can deploy an agent on a physical server and just start backing that up to one of our Briks. It can technically be done now but the Brik has to be able to talk to the server directly, so a direct path or VPN is required.

* Integration with video CD (coming in the next release) and a multi-tenant GUI. * Availability in a NFR format of virtual appliances to test them in public cloud environment.

Troubleshooting failed backups is not what it should be. Once you gather logs, deciphering them without the help of support is usually almost impossible. However, support is great in that regard.

I think the product is perfect as it is. It does exactly what it is supposed to, backup and restore. One additional feature that would be nice in one of the next releases would be the integration of MySQL/MariaDB.

It needs to support more applications natively, like MySQL/MariaDB. Put more attention on the physical world. They already support it bit, but I would love to see endpoint protection.

It is not Windows Cluster-Aware at the moment or Exchange DAG-Aware. If they add support for these particular use cases, it would be even better.