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RUBRIK FIBER OPTIC OM3 LC/LC CABLE

Mfg # RBK-F3M-CBL-01 CDW # 4110108 | UNSPSC 26121607

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This item was discontinued on June 15, 2023

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Rubrik 3M,OM3, LC/LC Fiber Optic Cable,pack of 4 is rated 4.80 out of 5 by 65.
Rated 5 out of 5 by from ?Features include: Global (Google Like) Search, Instant Mount, Replication and Cloud Archive. What is most valuable? Global (Google Like) Search - This allows us to instantly search for servers and files whether they are hosted on the local Rubrik appliance, replicated to another Rubrik appliance or in the long-term storage tier. Instant Mount - This provides us with the ability to perform instant restores within seconds and whats best is it can be scripted. Restores enable fast invocation of DR, DR testing and Test/Dev. Replication - Replicate to another brik to enable DRaaS. This is excellent for our customers as it removes the need for a secondary DR data centre and all the associated costs such as hardware, connectivity, management and licensing. Cloud Archive (Cloudian, S3, NFS) - This long-term storage tier ensures unlimited data retention can be achieved without the need for tape. This scale-out architecture keeps costs low and allows geographical separate for DR/compliance. How has it helped my organization? Speed of deployment - Setup takes 30 minutes then configuration is performed through a simple UI. Automation - Create Local SLA domains and automate ongoing protection. Cost reduction - Automation, scale-out architecture, central monitoring and BaaS/DRaaS in one solution all help to reduce TCO. What needs improvement? Since my last report we now have physical support for Linux and Windows. Hyper-V is coming very soon. We are confident by the end of 2017 that Rubrik won't have any gaps in their support matrix compared to their competition. For how long have I used the solution? Over 1 year. The solution is already excellent and is improving rapidly. Rubrik are eating up the competitors customer base. What was my experience with deployment of the solution? No. Its easy and quick. What do I think about the stability of the solution? No. Reliability is very good with Rubrik mainly due to the serious investment in the core technology. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? No. Add a brik and scale indefinitely. Scale-out to the cloud provides no fork lift upgrades and unlimited data retention. How is customer service and technical support? Customer Service: 10/10. Never seen support like it. Technical Support: The best of the best. Rubrik's investment in quality staff really shows. Which solutions did we use previously? Asigra. Old tech, dated code, poor with virtual environments. Zerto, great product for DR but only works on virtual and you can't keep history (journal) for long. How was the initial setup? Easy. Plug and play. What about the implementation team? We are a 100% Rubrik centric partner. We provide BaaS and DRaaS for enterprises worldwide with Capex and Opex budgets. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? It converges backup and DR into one product so is good value for money. If you need to pay for this on a monthly model then this is achievable through Assured Data Protection. Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:RUBRIK MSP - Operating through channel and direct
Date published: 2016-10-30T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Replaces legacy tapes and disk backups which are unreliable, expensive, and space consuming What is our primary use case? Replaces legacy tapes and disk backups which are unreliable, expensive, and space consuming. How has it helped my organization? It has the ability to test DR in a controlled, inexpensive way and to restore between environments. What is most valuable? CloudOut, because only blocks are pushed after compression and deduplication, not raw sizing which is often a flaw with storage products. What needs improvement? Better integration for complex NAS structures having to mount at root adds time and workload to the process of NDMP. For how long have I used the solution? Still implementing. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-02-25T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Backup time and infrastructure complexity are drastically reduced. The disk mount feature allows for immediate restore. What is our primary use case? We use this solution for IaaS customer environment backup in cloud and for internal purposes. We're planning on offering a GUI to the customers so that they'll be able to restore by themselves. How has it helped my organization? * Time dedicated to backup was drastically reduced. * Reduced infrastructure complexity, and easy and fast to restore. What is most valuable? * Disk mount that lets a restore happen immediately, no need to re-hydrate. * A reduced infrastructure complexity and fast to rack and go. What needs improvement? * 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. For how long have I used the solution? One to three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? No issues, integration between hardware and software makes it very stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Not at all, it's built to be scalable. How is customer service and technical support? Any of the few customer issues were promptly solved by the support. We had internal training through videos offered on their site. Which solutions did we use previously? We used Commvault and Acronis and we switched, the first because of complexity, the second because of unreliability. How was the initial setup? Very simple and assisted by their engineers on site. What about the implementation team? We bought it directly from Rubrik, whose support is praiseworthy. What was our ROI? Since it was fast to rack and go, ROI is highly positive, and customer response was great. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Setup is immediate but pricing is not cheap. The best solution for a small company is to join a provider to backup in the cloud and/or locally with Rubrik Air (BaaS). Which other solutions did I evaluate? We looked at VEEAM (but was based only on a software solution) and Cohesity (similar but less performant). What other advice do I have? I'm completely enthusiastic about the product, and I advise it to everyone who needs a fast and easy solution. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-07-11T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from CloudOn implementation allows for virtual machines to be stored offsite, instantiated, and spun-up What is our primary use case? We are searching for a new backup product that reduces man hours and helps us automate more of the backup and recovery process for our MSP team. How has it helped my organization? We used to primarily be a Veeam shop when it came to doing backups in our data center and I never thought I would look for another product. However, some issues started cropping up with very large virtual machines that Veeam didn't have an easy way to solve. I decided to try out Rubrik. I can tell you that it was one of the best decisions we have made. It fixed all of our backup issues and cut backup remediation to nearly nothing. We've gained at least ten hours a week and I never have to worry about whether something is being backed up or not. What is most valuable? Automation functions, image based backup, and the ability to instantly recover anything from files to databases. We have also implemented CloudOn which allows us to deploy backed up virtual machines stored offsite in Azure instantiated as an Azure virtual machine and spun up. It's a perfect scenario for low cost, full disaster recovery. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? Less than one year. What do I think about the stability of the solution? Nope What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Nope How is customer service and technical support? Customer service is top notch, which I am usually pretty disappointed in. So far it's the best I've seen for a tech company. Their service is far beyond my expectations. Which solutions did we use previously? We used Veeam and switched because of ease of use and time savings. How was the initial setup? Initial Setup was simple. I think the box took longer to mount in the rack than it did to setup. What about the implementation team? Rubrik came onsite for our initial deployment. Subsequent installs we've done ourselves. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Rubrik is an expensive product, more expensive than most. However, the larger the environment you have, the quicker you will see savings in man hours. We rarely have to touch our backup environment anymore as its so well designed, managed and automated. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We did not look elsewhere because Veeam was already at the top of the list. What other advice do I have? If you can afford this product, I fully recommend it. You will not look back. Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Rubrik Service Provider Partner
Date published: 2018-07-11T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Deployment was quick, easy, and straightforward How has it helped my organization? Rubrik has allowed our Managed Backup product to be elevated from a home-brewed concoction of free backup products wrapped in our special "glue" to a modern, intelligent, single-pane-of-glass orchestration engine. We are no longer embarrassed to explain how our backup product works! What is most valuable? * Near-zero RTO for VMs * API-first architecture * Intelligent agent technology What needs improvement? There are some corner cases where the Rubrik Connector (Agent) still doesn't work for our clients, but Rubrik Engineering listens to our feedback and has been delivering the features that we have been asking for over the last year, so we are confident that they will knock those out soon, as well. What do I think about the stability of the solution? Early on there was an issue with our special "flavor" that caused some instability with the Rubrik nodes, but that was resolved within a couple of months by their engineering team. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? No, our biggest Rubrik cluster is 10 briks/20 nodes and we're still growing that pool. How is customer service and technical support? Customer Service: Very good, almost a 10 out of 10. They are among the very best vendors we've worked with. Technical Support: Very good, an eight out of 10. Which solutions did we use previously? Yes, we previously used a home-brewed solution that didn't have the scalability that we needed. How was the initial setup? Straightforward. The deployment was about 20 questions and 20 minutes, and it was done. What about the implementation team? In-house team. What was our ROI? Approximately three years. Which other solutions did I evaluate? Yes, we evaluated Bacula Enterprise, Commvault, Veeam, and EMC Avamar/Data Domain. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-11-02T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Fast recovery is managed by attaching a disk where the backup is located. What is most valuable? The most valuable feature of this product is fast recovery from the backup. Fast recovery is managed by attaching a disk where the backup is located. It's immediately available to the customer who doesn't need to wait for the system to recover the BKP from an archive. How has it helped my organization? The traditional backup solutions didn't allow us to give a prompt answer to customers who needed recovery. Plus, there were too many human resources involved for management. What needs improvement? Some of the areas that need improvement are the user GUI (multi-tenancy) and the promised Rubrik Edge solution, which will allow customers to back up their physical devices in our cloud. About the GUI, the interface for our customers is not available at the moment in a multi-tenant environment. For how long have I used the solution? I have used this solution for around ten months. What do I think about the stability of the solution? We encountered an anomaly in freeing up space after archiving but the resolution from support has been satisfactory and fast. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? We have not encountered any scalability issues. This is the best scalable backup device that we found in the market. How is customer service and technical support? The level of technical support is very high in terms of the availability, skills and low time to solve issues. Which solutions did we use previously? Previously, we have used Commvault. It was a nice solution and also effective in deduplication. However, the license renewal costs were similar to 1 box of Rubrik. We have also used Acronis, but it's not an enterprise-class product and the several issues that we encountered have not been solved by their support. We still use it because of the customer interface and BaaS. How was the initial setup? It's been fast. It took about one hour and was installed for free by a Rubrik field engineer. It is important to note that they have no offices in Italy, so they came from Netherlands for installation. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Licensing is included in the HW. Pricing is adequate for CSP; however, it might be a bit too high for small companies. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We evaluated other traditional SW products; more or less, we looked at all of them. What other advice do I have? If a fast recovery and scalability are critical points, then this is the best choice. It is important to note that it's an HW solution, so all the CPU, RAM and other resources are completely dedicated to backup. Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:We became partner a few months ago.
Date published: 2017-01-22T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from The system is able to determine when it is the best time to do backups. This is SLA-driven. What is our primary use case? We were operating more than 10 different backup products company-wide and none of them were doing the job correctly. While reviewing the market, I found Rubrik. They were small at the time, and have since acquired a lot of credibility. The first PoC was a real success. We decided to start with them at the end of 2017. We were amazed by the product's simplicity and performance. How has it helped my organization? It improved the backup/restore process by a factor of a 1000. Now, we are sure what we have on our system is an exact image of what it was at the time of backup. Restoration validation is piece of cake. This is all new to us. What is most valuable? With Rubrik, there is backup window to manage. The system is able to determine when it is the best time to do backups. This is SLA-driven, and if it is not possible to maintain this SLA, the system will tell you too. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? Still implementing. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The platform is completely stable. We have never a crash. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? So far, so good. How is customer service and technical support? Customer support is very efficient. It is very similar to Nutanix, in my opinion. Which solutions did we use previously? We tried Veeam, which could be a valid alternative, except: * You still need storage (Rubrik provides a turnkey solution). * You need a Windows license (Rubrik is Linux-based). * You still need to manage jobs (Rubrik is SLA-based). How was the initial setup? The initial setup is easy. I created a blog post about it. What about the implementation team? I did everything by myself. What was our ROI? It is hard to tell so far. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Rubrik is not cheap. Hopefully, you can archive your data on cheap storage to keep the investment minimal. Which other solutions did I evaluate? Veeam was considered, but dismissed. What other advice do I have? Do not be afraid to go with newcomers. Rubrik is a fast growing company, and there is a reason for it: They understand the business! Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-07-02T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Easy, no need to worry about managing backup jobs, all based on SLAs What is our primary use case? Our primary use case is vCenter and Nutanix AHV backups. We are in an international environment which does not provide any backup window, so the SLA way of doing things is amazing. How has it helped my organization? * Easy, no need to worry about managing backup jobs. * All based on SLAs. * Easy to run and learn. * Nice interface. * API driver and reporting included. What is most valuable? Adaptative backup and SLAs. They simply allow you to tell a machine to backup without taking care of the backup window. This is a real improvement. What needs improvement? It is already very well furnished, but live mounts for Nutanix AHV would be amazing. From what I understand, however, this will not be soon. For how long have I used the solution? Still implementing. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-04-29T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Simple, straightforward, and able to see 50% hard savings How has it helped my organization? Rubrik backup is more than twice as fast as our previous solution. Also, its deduplication rate is significantly better. What is most valuable? * One platform for instant recovery * Search * Development * Cloud What needs improvement? Rubrik can only leverage cloud storage for archiving and has no cloud failover. What do I think about the stability of the solution? None to date. It just works. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? No. Rubrik is easily scalable when it comes to both capacity and performance. How is customer service and technical support? Excellent and speedy, too. Which solutions did we use previously? Yes, Asigra. Switched due to cost, near zero recovery times, and the fact that VMDK restores constantly failed. How was the initial setup? Literally racked, powered on, and all done in 30 minutes. I just needed my Vcenter details. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? It’s simple, straightforward, and we were able to see 50% hard savings. Which other solutions did I evaluate? Commvault, Arcserve, and Datto. What other advice do I have? See past the immaturity of the product. This will improve RPO/RTOs and save you a lot of time and money. Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner.
Date published: 2017-08-23T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from The initial setup was straightforward. The bootstrapping process was right to the point and direct. How has it helped my organization? Saved tons of man hours on not having to do constant babysitting. What is most valuable? Personally, the scripting portion is my favorite aspect. They have a great PowerShell module and easy mediums to speak to the people who create and enhance them. What needs improvement? The functionality is missing, but they are very receptive to our thoughts and ideas. What do I think about the stability of the solution? We ran into a few issues with physical Briks and EDGE Appliances crashing, but they were all resolved by either settings, tweaks, or hotfixes. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? No issues with scalability. We have added two Briks to our environment with success. How is customer service and technical support? Customer Service: A 10 out of 10. Technical Support: A 10 out of 10. Which solutions did we use previously? We used a combination of Veeam and Micro Focus Data Protector (was HPDP). The scalability of those two products was lacking, and it took a lot of man hours to babysit the products. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was straightforward. The bootstrapping process was right to the point and direct. What about the implementation team? In-house. What was our ROI? Not applicable. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Not applicable. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We had a PoC between Veeam/HPDP, Cohesity, and Rubrik. Rubrik won out. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-10-26T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from The archive functon allows for data archival on the cloud or through NFS Share What is our primary use case? We use it to backup our virtual machines, specifically file-based backup and backup of our SQL Database. We also use it to archive data on NFS Share and the cloud. How has it helped my organization? We are now able to perform fast backups and very quick restores. Now we have a tool to restore a virtual machine with Windows Server 2012 R2 from about 1 TB in around 2 minutes up to login. What is most valuable? The Archive function, which allows you to archive data on the cloud or NFS Share. This allows us to use cheap space in the cloud to archive long-term data, and for short-term data we can use NFS Share. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? Less than one year. What do I think about the stability of the solution? No What do I think about the scalability of the solution? No, if you need more space you can simply add a node. How is customer service and technical support? Very good support who helps with each question. Very fast response time. Which solutions did we use previously? Yes, we used VMProtect but had problems with large Debian virtual machines under VMware. Sometimes the virtual machine got stuck with CPU at 100% after removing the snapshot. This solution has much better backup and restore times. How was the initial setup? Straightforward What about the implementation team? Implemented through a in-house team. What was our ROI? One hour for critical virtual machines. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The product is not cheap, but you get really good value for your money. Setup costs are cheap because the product is easy to setup. Which other solutions did I evaluate? Yes we tried Veeam, but we had the same problem with large Debian virtual machines. The performance was not really better. What other advice do I have? Everyone who needs fast backup and quick restore should try it. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-07-11T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Drives the back-end through a powerful, well-documented API What is our primary use case? Rubrik was purchased to replace our aging backup solution. Providing us an 'all-in-one' unit to manage backup, DR, and BC. How has it helped my organization? Newly onboarded and very impressed. Removes all the headaches of a traditional three-tier backup solution. A little bit of fine tuning needed, but what product does not. What is most valuable? * Single pane of glass interface * Drives the back-end through a powerful, well-documented API. What needs improvement? Error/fault reporting. When errors do occur, it can be a somewhat painful process to get to the bottom of issues. On the plus side, the support channel is fantastic. This means if you can't find out why, they will and quickly. For how long have I used the solution? Still implementing. What do I think about the stability of the solution? No stability issues. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? No scalability issues. How is customer service and technical support? Five star rating: Calls are picked up and managed through constant communication to ensure a speedy resolution. Which solutions did we use previously? HPE Backup Servers, Dell EMC Data Domain, and Veeam. Whilst this solution was effective, it took considerable management to keep it all working. Rubrik's all-in-one approach removed all the complexity. How was the initial setup? Easy install/setup - Literally an hour from the box arriving to ingesting the first data. What about the implementation team? Vendor (fantastic knowledge and service) and in-house implementation. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Rubrik is an all inclusive price. No additional implementation costs or licencing. Which other solutions did I evaluate? Yes. Like for like replacement, with consideration of Veeam, Arcserve, Dell EMC Data Domain, NetApp AltaVault, etc. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-02-25T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from This solution can serve as a secondary host for emergency recoveries What is our primary use case? * Daily backups at different intervals * Audits * Live mounting of production servers * DR We are a 90 percent VM environment. We have a different OS environment, as well as databases. How has it helped my organization? The product is simply easy to use, efficient, and its out-of-the-box configuration just works. The SLA policy set makes it easy to manage and forget about time conflicting backup schedules. We have had a few recoveries, and this solution worked very well. What is most valuable? The live mounting and compatibility of different operating systems is great. Rubrik can also serve as a secondary host for emergency recoveries. It is fast and efficient. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? One to three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? No issues. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? No issues. How is customer service and technical support? Support is very friendly, easy to work with, and showed great expertise in the product. Which solutions did we use previously? We used Avamar, and it was complicated. How was the initial setup? The initial setup is straightforward. We were up and running within an hour. What about the implementation team? We had the vendor team onsite, and it was super fast to set up. What was our ROI? As little downtime as possible. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The product is not cheap, but for good reason. It simply works and is very fast. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We thought about Veeam. What other advice do I have? Give it a try and find out for yourself if it is for your environment. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-07-19T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from This solution reduced the amount of failed backups, which led to a reduced workload in IT operations What is our primary use case? As a financial company, we are under stringent data compliance, availability, and integrity rules. We use Rubrik to enhance governance of data archiving, as well as the backup and restore production environment consisting of multiple converged systems. We are also looking into the feasibility of using Rubrik as part of the firm's BCDR efforts and enhancement of the development environment. How has it helped my organization? Rubrik has led to improvement by reducing the amount of failed backups, leading to a reduced workload in IT operations. It has a streamlined user interface, provides an improved tech support experience, and reduces the time required to locate and restore data. What is most valuable? Automation with PowerShell allowed us to realize the additional benefits of integrating Rubrik with other PowerShell-capable systems within the same framework. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? Less than one year. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-07-16T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Simple and reliable with great value What is most valuable? We like this product because of its simplicity, pricing and reliability. For how long have I used the solution? One to three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? This solution is stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? This solution is scalable. How is customer service and technical support? The tech support is extremely helpful. How was the initial setup? It was a straightforward setup. It was simple to do. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? It is a great value, but its cost is still high. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2019-01-06T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from The process to manage backup and recovery is painless with this tool What is our primary use case? The primary use case is easy backup and recovery for multiple servers and workstations. It also backups NAS, SQL Servers, and Nutanix. How has it helped my organization? Rubrik has made the process to manage backup and recovery painless. This frees up more time to work on other projects. What is most valuable? The quick, easy backups and fast restore work great. I also enjoy support calls and the easy updates to the software. What needs improvement? No areas need to be updated at this time. The addition features that I would like are a way to set monthly backups on a certain date and time. Also, I would like for unmanaged backups to be able to be saved in a separate policy. For how long have I used the solution? One to three years. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-05-02T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from An easy initial setup, very stable, and offers a very fast recovery process What is most valuable? The instant recovery aspect of the solution is the most valuable aspect for me. It can recover the entire VMO database within five seconds. It's really quick. The database can be recovered on the local backup machine disk, and then brought up by the virtual machines. Of course, afterwards, you need to refresh your vMotion back to the original storage area. That takes a long time, maybe hours, however, the instant recovery portion only takes seconds to recover on the SSD hard disc. The initial setup is easy. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I've been using the solution, at this point, for about one and a half years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The solution is very stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? I believe the solution can scale pretty well. I haven't actually tried it out at our organization, therefore, it's hard to say for sure. There only a couple of admin personnel on the solution at our company. How are customer service and technical support? We have dealt with technical support in the past. In fact, we have three open cases right now. They've been pretty good in terms of the service they provide. They are responsive and are able to fix the problems we have. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? Before we began using Rubrik, we used to use HP Data Protector. We decided to switch due to the fact that the HP solution we had was getting to be too old and we realized simply upgrading it would have cost us quite a bit of money. The old solution we had was using a tape library to backup the data and it took too long to backup all the data on the tape. We were trying to find another better way or faster way to backup our data source. That's why we ultimately chose Rubrik. How was the initial setup? We found the initial setup to be very straightforward. It wasn't complex for us in any way. The deployment process took a few hours. It didn't take too long. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The cost of the solution is quite high. It's not cheap. What other advice do I have? We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with Rubrik. I'm not sure which version of the solution we are using, however, it may be a variation of version five. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. If it had a friendlier user interface, I would probably rate it higher. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2020-07-30T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Live mount capability significantly reduces complexity and provides good RTO What is our primary use case? We use this solution extensively - it helps with fast recovery scenarios and some ransomware issues. The solution is used by the operations department and I believe there are more than five people involved in maintenance, most are storage or network admins. I'm an engagement architect. What is most valuable? The live mount capability is the most valuable feature in the product because it reduces the complexity and gives us good RTO. What needs improvement? The user interface could be improved, it's pretty rough. For how long have I used the solution? I've been using this solution since it was introduced into the market about four or five years ago. What do I think about the stability of the solution? There is good stability in this solution, it's reliable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The solution is highly scalable and reliable. We have a lot of users in the company, most are storage and backup admins. Not everyone has access to the backup system. How are customer service and technical support? Rubrik customer support is excellent. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? I have used Veritas in the past. We switched to Rubrik because the solution offered more. How was the initial setup? The initial setup is very straightforward. Deployment to about three hours, no more. The setup time really depends on net issues. What other advice do I have? This product is easy to manage. I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? Hybrid Cloud Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Extremely easy to use and very versatile What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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. What is most valuable? The ease of use is the most valuable feature. It is a very simple system compared to just about any other back up technology like Commvault or EMC Avamar. It is extremely easy to use and very versatile. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? 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. What do I think about the stability of the solution? 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. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? 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. How are customer service and technical support? 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. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? 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. How was the initial setup? 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. What about the implementation team? 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. What was our ROI? 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. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? 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. Which other solutions did I evaluate? 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. What other advice do I have? 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. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? Hybrid Cloud Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2020-07-29T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Good protection, impressive support, and suitable for enterprises What is our primary use case? It is used for data protection, data backup and security, and disaster recovery. It is also used for backup as a service inside the organization, and it is sometimes also used for cloud migration. What is most valuable? The security and the ransomware protection are most valuable. What needs improvement? They need to find a solution for SMBs. It is currently only suitable for enterprises or big customers. They need to find a solution that suits SMBs. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using this solution for almost five years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It is scalable. How are customer service and support? They are very impressive. Their support is good, and they are cooperative. How was the initial setup? It was straightforward. It took a maximum of two days. For its deployment, you need one to two technical engineers. For support, you need one technical engineer. What other advice do I have? If you want to compare this solution to others, it should be an apple to apple comparison. This way, you will see the full value of the solution. I would rate it a nine out of 10. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Enables archive to cloud location and automation around the PowerShell script but doesn't cater for open source databases What is our primary use case? The use case is for backups of virtual environments, so it covers all IT areas. Whether it's infrastructure, virtualization or database platforms, our organization uses it for backups and storage. The solution is deployed on-premise. The version I'm running is 5.3.1. What is most valuable? The most valuable feature is the archive to cloud location and the automation around the PowerShell script. There are also reports and dashboards. There is simplicity in going through the interface and servers and setting SLAs. Overall, the product is good. It's just a single pane of glass. Rubrik has ransomware and encryption, so there is nothing I can fault on the technology. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Rubrik for three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? Rubrik has come a long way. Initially, it was a bit unstable in giving incorrect information, but I think that has been rectified. The performance of the devices was an issue. When you added devices, it was a problem. Rubrik actually leverages off your Microsoft VSS, so Rubrik is basically just a front-end. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It is scalable, but you're just locked in because you have to buy a Rubrik device unless you go with the cloud. There's another team that does maintenance. There are other products, so the team isn't just dedicated to Rubrik. We have about five individuals using Rubrik. We are planning to increase usage. There are between a few hundred workloads to a thousand in IT. We're basically looking at cloud technology, so we're not actually using Rubrik. How are customer service and support? The technical support is excellent. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? I played with various technologies. I played with Veeam, Data Domain, Commvault, and Tivoli. We switched to Rubrik because of the user interface. The other products use the same VSS Microsoft. The only difference between all these backup products is just the user interface, the PowerShell modules, and the reporting that it presents. The underlying technology is all the same, whether it is Veeam, Data Domain, whatever it is. The only thing is the compression and the deduplication. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment took a day or two. What about the implementation team? We worked with Rubrik for deployment. What other advice do I have? I would rate this solution 7 out of 10. In terms of the compression, there are other products out there that are better in terms of deduplication and recovery time. Another thing is that you have to buy a Rubrik device if you don't go cloud. You can't go buy another piece of software, so you're actually locked in. My advice is if you want to go through Rubrik, then you must forward something that can protect the data and the backups from ransomware for end-to-end protection. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-01-07T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Good performance, cheap, and easy to implement What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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. What is most valuable? 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. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? We have been using Rubrik for the last one year. What do I think about the stability of the solution? Its performance and stability are fine. We haven't faced any issues in the past year. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? 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. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? 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. How was the initial setup? 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. What about the implementation team? 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. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? 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. What other advice do I have? 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. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-02-10T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from It's a good solution for enterprises of any size What is our primary use case? We use Rubrik to create backup servers for VMware. What is most valuable? Rubrik is stable and easy to use. For how long have I used the solution? I've been working with Rubrik for two or three years. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Rubrik is scalable, and it can work for enterprises of any size. How are customer service and support? Rubrik support is outstanding. How was the initial setup? Setting up Rubrik is easy, and their support team helped us through the process. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Rubrik is expensive. What other advice do I have? I rate Rubrik 10 out of 10. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Effective Live Mount feature, reliable, and straightforward installation What is our primary use case? We are using Rubrik for our server backups. How has it helped my organization? The Live Mount feature is one of the main features we use. It is saving us time in restoring the VMs, allowing us to give them quickly to the developers for testing. There is a faster turnaround time. What is most valuable? The most valuable feature has been the Live Mount feature. What needs improvement? There are some features Rubrik planning to give in next version. For instance, a tool where we can integrate with our SAP HANA native tool directly from the HANA studio/HANA Cockpit, to trigger backup and restore. We understand it is available in the new version, looking forward to it. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Rubrik for approximately three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? Rubrik is stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Rubrik is scalable. We can manage multiple Rubrik appliances from a single console. All of our IT infrastructure team are using Rubrik. We are using it in at our data centers in India, and we have another in the middle east. We have recently increased our usage of the solution. How are customer service and support? The technical support is good. We have good contact, all the issues are resolved on time. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We have previously used a backup tool only for virtual infrastructure, as we were migrating to SAP HANA from a virtual environment. We wanted to have a single solution for virtual and physical environments , Rubrik is helping us in a great way here. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was straightforward. However, since Rubrik was new to use and different than the previous our solution, there were some new things we need to understand, such as SLA based orchestrating. We were used to scheduling it manually before, Once SLA is done the automation in place. The full implementation process took us two and a half weeks. What about the implementation team? The implementation was directly from the OEM. What was our ROI? We have received a return on investment. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? We pay annually for the license for Rubrik. There are no additional costs. Initially, we needed to set it up, negotiate and finalize the offer. What other advice do I have? I would advise people who are wanting to implement this solution to evaluate their business case and the business requirement prior to making their decision because every enterprise has a different requirements and environments, they should do the thorough assessments, POC's then decide on what backup fits their needs. I rate Rubrik a nine out of ten Which deployment model are you using for this solution? Hybrid Cloud Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2021-11-28T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Easy to set up, supports cloud backup, and can be used as a file server What is most valuable? What I like about Rubrik is that you can back up to the cloud. It is a different kind of backup where you're not archiving the tape. Rubrik is a physical appliance. It is a dedicated appliance to which you can back up, and you can also back up to another device. So, you can back up to Rubrik and then to another device. If you have more than one site, you can set up Rubrik on site A and also on site B. You can back up to the Rubrik on site A and then replicate that data to the Rubrik on site B. I like it. There are so many functions. It can also be used as a file server. It is a physical appliance. It is a backup device, but it can also be used as a file server. It can back up a file share. What needs improvement? It is a lot more expensive than other solutions, but you get what you pay for. What do I think about the stability of the solution? I didn't have any issues with it. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? You can scale it. It is expensive, and it normally requires their support team's help because it is a physical brick. So, you usually connect another brick to it, and it scales out to that brick. So, it is easy to scale out. Scalability is not a problem. How are customer service and support? Since the time I've used it, I never had to call their support. I didn't have any issues with it. How was the initial setup? It is pretty easy to set up because it is a physical appliance. You just need to configure IP addresses. There is not much to set up on that. You just plug it into the network and assign IP addresses. After that, you just log in, and you're ready to go. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Some people say it is expensive, but you get what you pay for. If you want a Maserati, you have to pay for it. If you want to buy a Porsche, you have to pay for it. What other advice do I have? If you're still backing the tape, Rubrik is not going to be for you. I would rate it a strong nine out of 10. It is a solid product. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2021-11-25T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Scalable, helpful support, and simple deployment What is our primary use case? We have been using Rubrik to backup everything in the infrastructure, except the mainframe. For example, we were using it to do our DR, long-term archive, and some surveys on different cloud tiers. How has it helped my organization? One of the most valuable features was the ease of expanding the resources. Additionally, it is able to backup the cloud and on-premise. For how long have I used the solution? I have used Rubrik within the past 12 months. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The main pain points we experienced was the stability of the system. We received a lot of instability when we have upgraded from a certain version to a new version. The newer version was completely filled with bugs and we needed to purge the system every week until we update to a newer version that was available one year later. The stability of the code is the main problem, they need to make it better. When we have ironed out all the small problems, Rubrik was stable. When we were using our old backup we had approximately 40 incidents per week, with Rubrik we might only have two or three incidents per week. It is a lot more stable than our previous solution. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Rubrik is highly scalable and is easy to do. The process of increasing or scaling the solution is to add a new server, power on the server, tell the customer they have a new server and then everything gets rebalance on the new server. Increasing and decreasing is very fast and easy. How are customer service and support? When updates are needed everything is done through the support. When we need to upgrade we call the support, open a tunnel and the support will upgrade the box. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We have used other solutions in the past. How was the initial setup? The initial setup takes approximately four hours. In four hours, we set up the configuration, connected it to VMware, and took the first backup. The whole process was very simple. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Rubrik is priced high, but it was the solution that was providing us encryption and was secure. The solution price is high, but you get what you pay for. What other advice do I have? My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is for them to try and segregate the database on their own cluster. I rate Rubrik a ten out of ten. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2021-11-30T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Allows us to restore a VM in minutes and has the best ransomware detection and support What is our primary use case? It is used for backing up and restoring data. How has it helped my organization? Rubrik does snapshot backups. We have a virtual machine, which is a production machine. It is a production database server. We take a snapshot of the server to back up in Rubrik. When we need to test a version, or we need to test an application to do Windows patching and other things, we just stand up a virtual machine from the snapshot, put it in our test environment, and use that to test our patching. Everything that we have in production is also there in the test environment. So, when we test the patch, if anything breaks, we know we can't deploy it in production. It is also useful in case a VM crashes. When a VM gets corrupted or crashes, we can just stand one up from last night's snapshot. We have our VM up in less than five minutes. What is most valuable? The feature that I found most valuable is Live Mount. You can either mount a virtual machine from a snapshot, or you can mount a volume from the snapshot. You can mount one disk to the server to retrieve data, or you can mount the whole VM, rename it, and use it as a test VM. If your VM gets corrupted, you just mount one from the snapshot, and you have your production VM's backup. So, Live Mount is definitely the best feature for me as an end-user. Another feature that I love is their ransomware detection. Rubrik has one of the best ransomware detection out there. The backups are immutable, and nobody can change them. You can't override them. You can't change anything in the backups once the snapshot is taken. Our backup retention is 120 days. So, for 120 days, nobody can change that. When I take a snapshot of a server, if the next day we get hit with ransomware, I could shut that down. I can then just stand one up from the backup that I took yesterday. They can't change anything that is already in the backup. What needs improvement? There is room for improvement in pricing. After the licensing, the price tends to go up as time goes by. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is very stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It is definitely scalable. It is used to the extent of any other application in our production environment. We will definitely increase its usage. Because this is a backup and restore application, only system administrators are the ones who schedule all the backups and do all the restores. There is also an option where you could give a user permission to do certain things. For example, we have DBAs who have access to restore databases. They cannot overwrite anything, but they can mount, and they can copy. How are customer service and support? When you sign a contract with them, support is a part of the package. Their tech support was very knowledgeable. They allow you to do your work, and if you run into a problem, they jump in and help you. They explain the issue to you so that in the future, you know what you're doing next. They don't just do things behind the scenes to fix things. They keep us in the loop. Their technical support is second to none. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We used Commvault. Commvault had started to become a little bit cumbersome when it was time to do upgrades. We had all physical servers from Commvault. We had 12 media agents, and at the time of upgrade, we had to individually upgrade all 12 media agents. So, upgrading with Commvault was a two-week project for us, whereas upgrading with Rubrik is a two-hour project. How was the initial setup? It was totally straightforward. There was absolutely no stress or chaos. It was an easy deployment and easy migration. Our environment is pretty huge. We have about 8,000 to 9,000 servers. The deployment took a few months. It probably took five to six months, but the nice thing about it was that Rubrik's support was there all the time. They were involved at every step till we completed our migration. What about the implementation team? For deployment, we had two people from Rubrik. From our side, we had five people for deployment. For its maintenance, there are three people who take care of it all the time. They're backup administrators. They back up and restore the system. We have one engineer who is involved in this project for designing and implementation, which is me. What was our ROI? My boss and his seniors would know how much money they have invested and how much money or value it is bringing. From my perspective, it is saving us a lot of money because previously, we had Commvault, TSM, NetBackup, and Veeam. Replacing these four with Rubrik has definitely saved us a lot of money. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Its price tends to go up with time. Its pricing definitely has room for improvement. If you negotiate right with them, you might get a good price. Support is a part of the package, and every three years, when we renew our contract, we get new hardware. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We evaluated Cohesity. We had NetBackup, but Rubrik was best geared for us because we also have a cloud initiative. So, we needed a solution that we could use to back up on-prem and to the cloud. We wanted to be able to swap virtual machines from on-prem. We wanted to take an on-prem virtual machine and stand it up in the cloud. Rubrik had exactly what we needed. One of the main features that helped us make our decision was ransomware detection. What other advice do I have? If data security is one of your main priorities, I would definitely recommend Rubrik. Its features work great. They have all the features that I need. What I would like us to purchase is a feature called Sonar, where you run a scan, and it tells you where patient data is sitting. If an end-user has patient data on the desktop, it'll tell you that this is where the patient data is. So, we can see who is really within compliance and who is not. I would rate Rubrik a nine out of 10. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Excellent support, beneficial restorations, and simple installation What is our primary use case? We use Rubrik for backup and recovery. How has it helped my organization? Rubrik is critical for our organization because it keeps our data safe. It helps us meet all of our POs and TOs. What is most valuable? The most valuable features of Rubrik are the restoration and ease of use. What needs improvement? The solution could improve by having fewer VM Stuns. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Rubrik for approximately three years. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? We have recently scaled the solution and it went well. We have an administrator and people who do the restorations that use the solution. How are customer service and support? I rate Rubrik support a five out of five. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We were previously using Avamar, but we switch because it was too expensive. How was the initial setup? The initial installation was very simple. I would create the ease of installation a five out of five. What about the implementation team? We used a VAR for the implementation and our experience was excellent. What was our ROI? 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. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? 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. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We evaluated other options before, such as Cohesity. We choose Rubrik because it was overall a better solution. What other advice do I have? 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. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Easy to install What is our primary use case? I am a reseller in Sweden. Rubrik is a specific backup solution for the environment. What is most valuable? The management and ease of installation are the most valuable features. How was the initial setup? The initial setup of Rubrik is straightforward. It requires one person to deploy the solution. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The price is too high. The price of Rubrik is too high, especially when you are considering a change in the total backup solution. What other advice do I have? If you are considering Rubrik as a solution be sure about the costs for expansion. I rate the solution a 9 out of 10. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-01-23T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Summarized reports are helpful, and it is able to do 95% to 98% of the things that we want to do What is our primary use case? We back up our virtual infrastructure with it. We have about 400 virtual machines that we back up. We are using its latest version. We upgraded just recently. How has it helped my organization? It is basically a backup solution, and we use it when we need to. We have had Veeam, IBM TSM, and a couple of other solutions before this. From the business perspective, the users don't see anything different other than submitting a ticket saying that they need something restored. Our DBAs utilize it as well. They do test environments. They'll pull stuff from the backup system into their testing areas so they can test different scenarios, and so far, they're liking it fairly well, which is completely different from when we utilized Veeam. We basically had to go and do it for them. With this, we were able to offhand different tasks to different departments, and they could do their own tasks. So, it has made it much easier in terms of infrastructure where we can give other departments the ability to perform their own tasks and projects. What is most valuable? Its reporting is most valuable. I like how it reports that everything is successfully backed up. It provides a summarized report that I can give to auditors and management. What needs improvement? Their documentation can be improved to provide information about how some of the things work. They should give more access to the backend capabilities. From a customer point of view, you do not have access to all the features on the system. You have to engage their support to perform some of the tasks. It would be helpful for an experienced engineer to be able to go and do some of those tasks prior to contacting the support. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using this solution for about three or four years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? There are no issues on the side of Rubrik itself. Rubrik seems to be very stable, especially when it comes to their physical installs. If it's a physical backup appliance, it works really well. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? So far, we've not had any issues at all. We have 16 nodes on one site, and we also have several virtual Rubriks where it's just a single instance. So, we have a range of different configurations, and all of them scale pretty decently. We have about 10 users who use it directly. Its usage depends on the day. At times, it's heavily used, and at other times, it's not. It's a come and go thing. How are customer service and support? We contact their technical support a lot. It is about two times a week, but it's usually where we've gone beyond the norm of what a normal customer utilizes the system for. So far, they have been very responsive, and nine times out of 10, they are able to accomplish the task that we're trying to perform. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We had Veeam before this, and we've also had IBM TSM, Tivoli. We've also used a couple of other solutions out there. We switched because the cost of Veeam was too much. After 200 core licenses, the support cost was almost the same as buying Rubrik for the first time. How was the initial setup? I've been here 13 years, and I actually deployed it. I've deployed five different sites, so we don't have just one. For the most part, it was pretty straightforward. It took about 30 minutes. What about the implementation team? The first time, we used a consultant from Rubrik, and after that, we did it ourselves. Our experience with them was exceptional. It was really good. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I don't remember the cost, but I know that for Veeam, we were spending almost $250,000 a year for 205 licenses. It was an enterprise version. When we purchased Rubrik, it was just a little bit more. It was not a terribly huge amount, and if I recall, that was for three years of support as well. So, Veeam priced itself out of the market at a certain point in time. In terms of additional costs, there are some add-ons that they have built. Since the time we purchased it, there have been different cloud offerings. When you purchase the appliance or Rubrik basic services, you get all services. As far I'm aware, you don't necessarily have to purchase extra things. They don't nickel and dime you. What other advice do I have? I would advise others to do a PoC, test it, and see how well it works. They should compare it to some of the other solutions that they can PoC as well. That's because we've seen that there are a couple of places in our environment where Veeam still makes logical sense versus Rubrik. Rubrik is able to hit about 95% to 98% of the things that we want to do, which is not going to be the case for every company, but it will fit most customers' needs. I would rate it a nine out of 10. They're able to hit the mark about 95% to 98% of the time, and when we have problems, they're able to jump on and help out. We're always able to work through it. Sometimes, it might take time. There is no perfect product out there that I'm aware of, or else we would look at it. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-01-18T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Very scalable solution for protecting against ransomware attacks What is most valuable? The feature that I have found most valuable from Rubrik is its protection against ransomware attacks. Rubrik is a very nice, very good solution because it is able to protect your data and you have the possibility from the backup to detect any abnormal behavior, like a ransomware attack. You are able to detect and restore very easily with this solution. This is a major differentiator in comparison to the other competitors. Rubrik is a cloud based solution and the main differentiator for Rubrik in comparison to the others is that you do not have to configure your backup job, you just have to set up an SLA, Service Legal Agreement, and Rubrik has matching learning and AI, Artificial Intelligence. Rubrik then does maximum automation of these tasks. You have a multiple feature, including a search engine, like a Google search engine in the UI, and I think this is a very modern approach. Rubrik has a very modern approach. Rubrik is an all-in-one solution for your backup so you don't have to think about how to configure the architecture. Because Rubrik is a scale out solution, you just have to pay for an all-in-one solution, starting with a small brick and growing with your needs. You can start with few needs, and if you need more resources or more power, you just have to put another brick and the merged cluster grows automatically. In comparison to other solutions, you do not need to think about how to grow your architecture. With Rubrik, you don't have to think. If you have resources or more storage, you just have to buy a new brick. You put this new brick in the existing cluster and the whole system is configured automatically. What needs improvement? In terms of what could be improved with Rubrik, we need to improve the backup for remote sites. The competitors are stronger in terms of their remote office back up. Rubrik needs to improve to be stronger for backup. This is the main thing. In the next release I would like to see more advanced features. For example, currently you only have the possibility to archive your data on one target. I suppose they are working to develop this feature, but tomorrow, many customers want to have two target archives. This is the first issue. Also, they need to improve their Office 365 solution because Rubrik is able to back up the Office 365 solution, but currently they are not able to cover full functionality of Microsoft Teams and some customers tell us that we need to improve this feature. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Rubrik for two or three years because it is a new technology. My company sells this solution. What do I think about the stability of the solution? We have a big customer in France who chose this solution and they have a big, big cluster with more than 50 bricks, so I can say that this solution is reliable and stable. Rubrik might need to improve some features, but it is a stable solution. How was the initial setup? Deploying this solution is very, very easy. As I said before, you don't have to ask a lot of question of the customer. You just receive the solution, the brick. You put the brick in the customer's data center and you just ask some questions about networking, IP address, what do you want to back up? And the solution is ready to work quickly. The installation is very easy, and the sizing solution, which is my job because I am in pre-sales, is easy enough. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Rubrik's pricing is good. The most important thing to understand is that when you buy Rubrik, you don't buy only the software, you buy the software and the hardware. You should not compare it with other backup editors if only because with Rubrik you get the software and the hardware, so it is difficult to say if the solution is expensive. You need to show to the customers the total cost of ownership or the return on invest, because the solution is very easy to manage every day. I suppose somebody could say it is expensive, but it is not too expensive. What other advice do I have? When a customer buys this solution, he has to pass through a partner like Scasicomp. The customer will never install the solution by himself. Rubrik does not sell the solution directly to the customer, it sells the solution to the partner, like Scasicomp, and the partner will install this solution for the customer. But as I said before, it is very simple to install. On a scale of one to ten, I would give Rubrik an eight. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? Public Cloud Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2022-01-19T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Secure, simple to use , and the support is excellent What is our primary use case? It was a test environment for testing the backups. What is most valuable? 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. What needs improvement? The dashboard and user interface could be improved to make them more user-friendly. For how long have I used the solution? Rubrik was last used six months ago. What do I think about the stability of the solution? 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. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Rubrik is easy to scale. We had a team of about seven users when we were working with Rubrik. How are customer service and support? Technical support was pretty good. They were excellent. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? I have also worked with Cohesity, Dell, and Veritas. Cohesity was one of the simplest. It is more user-friendly. How was the initial setup? The initial setup is pretty straightforward. What about the implementation team? The Rubrik, team assisted us with the installation and the updates. What other advice do I have? I would rate Rubrik a nine out of ten. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-01-19T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Flexible data manager with multiple back up options What is our primary use case? I am a reseller and systems integrator. This is used as a backup solution that already has a hardware appliance associated with it. So you don't need to buy a separate appliance from another vendor since Rubrik would already have hardware that's compatible with its backup software. What is most valuable? I value the options it has for storage tiering (i.e. whether it should be a flash, SSD, or pushed to the cloud) depending on the data provided. What needs improvement? It would be nice if they could work on the pricing a bit. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is very stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It's able to be very scalable, either scaling up or scaling out. How are customer service and support? Support is good now that they are done restructuring. How was the initial setup? The initial setup is relatively straightforward takes a team of three anywhere from two weeks to a month depending on size. What other advice do I have? If clients agree to the relatively higher price point, it is definitely something we recommend, There is a lot of flexibility in how it can be deployed, and where their data can be backed up (i.e. on-premise or in the cloud). I would rate it an eight out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-01-27T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from We don't need to manage maintenance or backup windows anymore What is our primary use case? We have the r6000 series as the physical appliance. We also have the Rubrik Edge, which is a virtual appliance, depending where it is deployed. So, we have three strategic data centers where we are placing physical appliances. For test purposes and some branch offices, we are using the virtual appliance. Most of our workloads (98 or 99 percent) are virtual on-prem, then half a percent are physical and half a percent are in the cloud. In the cloud, we have both AWS and GCP, but it is still very light. We are in the process of migrating a percentage of our on-prem workloads into the cloud. We are in a telecom environment, so we have a lot of homegrown applications based on the Linux operating system. We have MSSQL and MySQL as well on the Linux environment. We are also protecting Windows Active Directory. We don't have a lot of proprietary applications, like SAP, but we have Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Active Directory, a couple of file servers, and the rest are mostly home-developed applications. How has it helped my organization? The main benefit is that we are secured in terms of workloads. We know that if we need to restore any VMs, or even any files inside a VM, that we will succeed 100 percent. This means that we don't need to spend much time administering the backup environment because we know it is self-healing and efficient. So, we are spending that time on something else, which is always a plus. We use Polaris. Polaris is the front-end, which provides us a centralized view of all our Rubrik deployments in the company. It is a way to see each event's alert reporting and have a map of the world where you have Rubrik deployments. A backup solution can help you with downtime. When you have something to correct, then it means that you need an immediate activity/action to restore the service. With Rubrik, we can immediately restore the corrupt data or VM. You don't need to worry about finding, loading, and indexing the date, then finding the relevant information to initiate a restore. With Rubrik, we don't need all those activities. We just need to do the search, click for the right VM, and push the restore button. That is it. We can probably reduce the downtime by a factor of 10 without any depth. What is most valuable? Rubrik's web interface is an eight out of 10. It is very easy to use, clear, and responsive. You don't need to click into many different places to get the information that you are looking for; it is intuitive. I like it a lot. The SLA-based policy automation that Rubrik brought to market five years ago was really a game changer. In the previous backup product, you always managed your backups on a job basis, so what you needed to do is, to say, "Okay, I'd like to backup that specific workload, but I need to stop at this time." With Rubrik, it is completely different. You just need to configure an SLA, saying, "Okay, I would like to have a daily backup," or "I would like to do a backup every six hours. However, Rubrik, start when you think it's the most appropriate time." Then, you don't need to manage maintenance or backup windows anymore. In our environment, where we have based our data centers in the US, Europe, and Asia, it is not a headache anymore to configure our backup jobs, since Rubrik deals with it. When you configure the Rubrik environment, it is a few clicks. Then, you are good to go, and it's already doing backups by itself. The solution’s archival functionality is very interesting because you have a lot of options. You can either archive on-prem or in the cloud. On-prem, you have the choice between object storage and block storage, which is nice, as it fits any environment. Archiving in the cloud is very easy as well. There is no support in GCP and AWS history in Glacier, so it is a very good option. It is easy to offload your local storage. If your brick is becoming full, you have two options: * You buy an extra brick, expanding the cluster, but it has a cost. * You can decide to archive your data. This means that the snapshots that you have on the Rubrik cluster can be migrated to another place. Another place can be either in the same data center or in the cloud. This is a great option, and we are using it. We are scripting a lot using the Rubrik API to gather some information about usage, monitor what is going on, or do some very specific actions, like initiating a backup from the command line within a scripted environment. So, it is very handy. There is a search feature inside the cluster. So, if you want to restore a specific file from a snapshot, you can then do a search inside the snapshot. The time that it takes to find and recover applications/files is almost instant. In the previous backup software that we were using, we didn't have the ability to dig inside and browse the snapshot, or even search inside the snapshot to find the required file. We can find instantly what we were looking for by searching inside a snapshot because Rubrik is maintaining a metadata DB where we can find anything that we want. Whether it is on-prem or archived already in the cloud, we can find anything using this search mechanism. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using it for about four years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? We have been a customer for the last four years without any hardware failure. That is one aspect of its reliability. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Like many other modern solutions, Rubrik is architected as a web-scale solution. This means that if you are running out of space, just stack another brick on top of the existing ones. You can stack bricks until a couple of racks are full. It is very easy. Scalability-wise, when we expand the cluster, it is non-destructive and non-disruptive. So, we can stack, and while it is stacking, we can still have backups running. Nobody notices that you are actually expanding. We have active administrators of the Rubrik platform at this time. How are customer service and technical support? If you have any issues with the software, then the Rubrik support is trained and responsive enough to get you covered. I would rate the technical support as a nine (out of 10). Rubrik selected a bunch of customers who are active with the product, trying to make it evolve. From time to time, we do meetings saying, "Okay, what could be nice to have in the future?" They are taking advice from the real users, and I am a part of that. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We were looking at a way to standardize our data security platform, because we were using a lot of different software, like Veeam, Aranda, HPE Data Protector, etc. In total, it was something like six or seven different backup solutions. It was completely scary to manage on a day-to-day basis. Depending where in the world that we needed to do backups, it was a different software. It was completely crazy to manage, not only because you needed specific knowledge of the product, but also because every product didn't have the same behavior and capabilities. This was one of the many issues that we had. Then, we decided to standardize into a common platform everywhere, and that was why we switched to Rubrik. The main driver was to find a way to back up over where Nutanix stressed us, because we are a Nutanix customer. At that time, not many vendors were able to protect Nutanix AHV workloads, but Rubrik was one of them, and we decided to do a trial with them. It was absolutely successful in each aspect. It was easy to use and efficient. You didn't need to worry about our restore tests, which were very easy. So, the use case that we have was to protect our Nutanix workloads and SQL DBs. Also, the flexibility that Rubrik has given us is absolutely crazy. How was the initial setup? 15 minutes is the time that you need to deploy a Rubrik cluster from unboxing to the first backup. In other words, the initial setup is very easy and straightforward. As soon as you have the network ready to accept the hardware, the right credentials to configure the different vCenters in the Nutanix cluster, and all the backup elements, 15 minutes is the time that you need to be up and running. What about the implementation team? I deployed it myself. It is too easy to involve a third-party, which would be a waste of time and money. What was our ROI? Rubrik has reduced the time that we spend on recovery testing. P... Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-02-21T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Automates most of our backup workflow, automatically adding VMs and assigning the SLA, and provides instant recovery What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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. What is most valuable? 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. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? 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. What do I think about the stability of the solution? 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. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? 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. How are customer service and technical support? 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 ha... Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-02-14T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Reduces time spent managing backups so we can work on more value-added activities What is our primary use case? We primarily use it for data backup for VMware as well as AIX, which is an IBM platform. We also use it for the value-adds that Rubrik brings, including Live Mount. We are on version 5.2 right now. We upgrade every little while. The version of the appliance is the r500 series. Our environments are virtual and physical. We don't protect anything in the cloud currently. Rubrik protects AIX versions 6 and 7, then primarily Windows and Linux hosted on VMware vSphere. We also do some standalone Linux and Windows boxes. As a subset of the Windows, we protect a lot of SQL Server databases. We do some IBM databases as well, but primarily SQL Server on Windows. How has it helped my organization? We like that Rubrik is SLA-based. Instead of us defining specific policies to specific servers, we create the SLAs which are kind of the foundation of your backup strategy. We then assign objects, servers, databases, or whatever we're protecting to an SLA. The SLAs work well, as in, they do what you expect, which seems intuitive. However, coming from our previous backup solution, backup software and intuition don't always go together. So, we are very happy. What is most valuable? Their Live Mount technology uses Rubrik as storage, while using our Cisco UCS Blades as compute for rapid restores of backups, which is really awesome. That is one of the biggest value-adds that Rubrik provides. It saves time as well as being easy and works well. Our previous backup solution restores were cumbersome, time-consuming, and labor intensive to do. They required a lot of validation. With Rubrik Live Mount, you can restore a system in well under a minute, whereas it would take up to hours in the past. Live Mount is where we do the majority of our big recoveries, unless it is a file recovery. A file recovery takes a few minutes to restore to where the file in the event a file was accidentally deleted by a user, etc. There has been at least a 90 percent reduction in recovery time based on our previous solution, from the need to recover something to when it's actually recovered went from hours to minutes. We really like their SQL tools around SQL Server as well as the ability to do transaction log backups and restore to a point-in-time based on those transaction logs. We also like the restore options: restoring in place or mounting a database to another server. Their toolset around SQL Server works really well. We like the web interface a lot. It is simple, but powerful. We like the solution’s archival functionality. We currently archive offsite to an NFS store in one location and a cloud S3 location for some other objects. We have been happy with the way that both of those work. We have used their search, which is powerful. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using this solution for about two and a half years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? We are happy with the stability. As far as the stability of the solution, like the software itself, it seems like it has been good. Obviously, it is not perfect, but we have been happy with the upgrade cadence and software release cadence that Rubrik has released with stability fixes and/or bug fixes. As far as the company goes, they had probably more questions a couple of years ago, but now it seems like Rubrik is one of the big players in the data management sphere, and it doesn't seem like the company is going anywhere, at least as far as we know, which is a comforting thing. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? We haven't had to do too much on the scalability front. However, the on-prem scalability makes sense. We are happy with it. We have currently an eight-node cluster on-prem, and if we needed to add more storage, we would essentially add another node or two to our cluster. So, we are happy with our options. We could scale from small to very large easily and with minimal configuration changes. How are customer service and technical support? We have been very pleased every time that we have had to contact their support. Their support has been really good. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We came from an old IBM solution that was complex. How was the initial setup? The initial setup is straightforward. The hardware install and initial setup went very smoothly and quickly. The only issue, two and a half years ago, was that we didn't have a great recommendation on how to back up specifically large servers. There are two different ways that we could do it: * With a full VM snapshot. * With a file set level, which basically goes through the server based on a filter and only backs up specific files. We initially did the file set method, even though we were backing up everything. That was not the most effective way of doing this. We reversed course and just started backing up everything via vSphere snapshots, which works so much better. However, we probably could have received a little better guidance initially on that front from the guy who came onsite to set the appliance up. Initial setup, after the planning, was probably only about four hours before we started getting backups. It was about a full week before all the backups were complete. We have some very large file servers that we were backing up. Some of those took a long time to finish for that first full backup. We switched from our previous backup platform. We just transitioned over to Rubrik, shutting off the backup of the old system one day, then starting to back up with Rubrik the next day. Because most of our servers or objects are in vSphere, our Rubrik integration with vSphere made this very easy. What was our ROI? The main thing would be the time savings for those of us in IT operations. In the past, coming from a complex backup solution that involved disk, tape, and rotating tapes, it ended up being almost a full FTE's job to manage and babysit the backup solution. We are down to under a quarter of an FTE. My manager says that it provided us with an FTE savings, and that frees us up to work on other more value-add things, because backup is not a huge value-add. It's necessary, and Rubrik has a lot of value-add features, but the backing up data isn't a value-add until you need it. So, we are saving between 35 and 40 hours a week. It is like an insurance for when the inevitable happens. You don't know you need something until the minute you need it, then you need it right away. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Rubrik is not the cheapest solution, but we've been happy with the time savings that we have seen. At least from what we have spent so far, we have been happy with the return on investment. We did a trial of Polaris Radar, which is ransomware detection. We saw value there, but it didn't fit in our budget, at least for the fiscal year that we were working with it. I don't think Rubrik Go was an option when we initially purchased this solution. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We evaluated an upgraded version of our IBM solution, because our version was old. We also evaluated Veem. We have been very happy with our selection of Rubrik. What other advice do I have? Definitely consider Rubrik if you value a simple, elegant, powerful backup tool. We did a trial of Rubrik Polaris Radar, which automatically detects file changes that would be an indication of a ransomware infection. We were happy with that. In the event of ransomware, their cloud-based tool would detect it. Also, we would be happy with the way that we could recover. Thankfully, we have not had to put this in practice. We haven't had to recover from ransomware. However, in every test that we have done, we have been very happy with how it works and the concept of immutable backups. Once the data is backed up, it can't be changed. This is important for ransomware recovery, so we are happy with how this would work in the event that we would ever have to use it. Rubrik's pre-built integrations or API support for integration with other solutions are some things that we would like to explore more in the future, other than just referencing some basic PowerShell commands or referencing the API through some basic PowerShell. I don't have an example of where we had to recover something from a catastrophic failure, which is good. However, we have confidence that if we did need to, there would be a reduction in downtime because of their recovery features. Biggest lesson learnt: We don't need to spend as much time managing backups as we used to. I would rate this solution as 10 (out of 10). Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-02-17T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Reduced our maintenance efforts, improving our productivity What is our primary use case? We have been mainly using Rubrik's backup and recovery solution for our microservice-based products, which we have for different trading applications. We have a trading application, where the customer makes use of any workflow through the GUI of the trading application. The request goes through our microservices server REST API. These microservices server REST APIs are sometimes using DynamoDB as a database solution. Our applications are quite scalable and user-friendly. We wanted our database solution to be highly scalable. Since all the trades being carried out between customers are highly secure in nature and carry sensitive data, we wanted this in case there was some type of application crash due to a timeout or downtime. Our database should not crash and the data should not be lost. For that purpose, we needed to use Rubrik's backup and recovery solution. So, on a weekly basis, we take regular snapshots of our databases via Rubrik's solution in case of any downtime, especially during the week from Monday to Friday when trading is being done at a high peak level. At that time, we take snapshots. In case there are any issues, then we will simply roll back our database to the previous snapshot which we had captured. We are protecting VMs. They are all virtual. How has it helped my organization? It has reduced our maintenance efforts. The amount of time and effort that would have gone in troubleshooting various issues related to a data crash has been addressed by Rubrik. So, it has helped to improve our productivity. The data is being captured about our customers periodically that is secure and safe. Our entire team uses the Grafana application to monitor the response time of various API that we have in the application. Because we can restore our application to its normal state, gradually the graph of the downtime comes down for APIs. For Grafana plotting, we are using different error codes. We see in graph form if there are any spikes in the error code, for how long those spikes remain, and how much time it took for the spikes to go down their normal level. What is most valuable? From a security point of view, data is highly-encrypted using the Rubrik security solution. Therefore, we don't have to worry about any image/data loss or data leakage. If there is any corruption of the snapshot, e.g., the target is corrupted while taking the snapshot, Rubrik is our faster option to have two snapshots: snapshot one and snapshot two. If there is some issue with snapshot two, then we still have the option to restore the data to snapshot one. In this way, we never lose the customer's trade data. Rubrik's web interface is very user friendly and easy to use with all its navigation, e.g., it is easy to identify if you're looking for any help. So, the help features are there. The customer support feature is very nice. We are regularly using that. The alignment of all the fields of the platforms on the Rubrik GUI are very good. Its archival functionality is very nice. On a regular basis, we snapshot our VMs and server logs. So, we keep archiving the logs and snapshots into Rubrik for archival functionality on a monthly basis. For 30 days, we maintain the snapshots of our data using the Rubrik archival functionality. Whenever we need to retrieve any snapshots that have been stored for the past one month, we can easily retrieve them. The retrieval process is also very fast from the archival function, and it doesn't take too much time. For how long have I used the solution? We have been using Rubrik for around three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? In my experience of using Rubrik, once or twice it didn't work and the issue was resolved quickly. Otherwise, it is quite stable. My colleague, my assistant, and I manage it. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It is highly scalable. We can easily add more VMs to our configurations or Rubrik account. It also can easily take snapshots. In-house users are around 25 to 30 people who are mostly from the DevOps profile: software engineers, the infrastructure team and release managers. Developers are also involved. How are customer service and technical support? We have received excellent customer support from Rubrik when addressing any of our queries, from time to time. The technical support is very good. They are quite well-versed with the Rubrik solution, so they provide quick solutions to our queries. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We were not previously using another solution. We learned third-party backup and recovery solutions can be good enough to handle and exhaust all our requirements. Instead of starting to build a backup recovery solution from scratch, we explored outside our organization. Now, third-party vendors are very good and intelligent data recovery solutions are available. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was between an easy to medium difficulty level. To install the Rubrik application, we created an account, then specified the contribution of our VMs. The microservices took the most amount of time during the setup part. Later on, defining the duration and frequency at which we want the snapshots to be taken was easy. The setup took three to four days. What about the implementation team? A colleague and I deployed it. Whatever we couldn't do, we directly contacted Rubrik for that. What was our ROI? Due to this effective, faster backup and recovery solution, we are now able to focus on other creative tasks to meet our entire pipeline. So, we have seen ROI in terms of the improvement of productivity in our team. We save around one million dollars a year. The solution has saved us 25 to 35 percent of our time. The maintenance has been very quick and fast to retrieve our snapshot from the archival functionality. If you had to source for any data research query, then that used to take around one hour for one terabyte of data. Now, that has been reduced to 20 to 25 minutes. It takes less time for us to restore data as well as reduces recovery time. The downtime has been reduced. Downtime used to be around five to six hours. Now, it has been reduced to three to four hours. This reduction happened after two or three weeks. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The licensing cost is quite high. That is something that needs to be worked out, because so many times it happens that the team does not have the budget or there are other issues at that time. Cost has become an important factor in deciding whether to continue with the Rubrik solution. The maintenance cost is low. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We also initially evaluated Cisco, Dell EMC, and Nutanix and found the Rubrik solution to be the most effective for our requirements. Almost all these solutions were equal. With the other vendors, the main problem was the customer support when we initially gauged those vendors, e.g., to get hands-on training to get a demo, then later on to follow up with their teams, the entire process wasn't smooth. However, with Rubrik, we didn't see this problem. We are considering migrating our microservice stack from a VM-based solution to Docker-based solution. So, we are considering a Docker integration with Rubrik for the communication of our microservices with ModAPI of our solution. For that, we probably need a handshaking mechanism. For that purpose, we are considering the Rubrik security REST APIs. What other advice do I have? I would strongly recommend trying the Rubrik solution. Their solution is stable, scalable, and intelligent. It has cloud solutions for our backup and security needs. We are not using the SLA-based policy automation feature of Rubrik. We might look at this in the future. Now, we have our own separate SLA-based automation tool. We are using Polaris, but there is another team at my organization who handles governance and compliance. They are in touch with our team to understand our entire integration, setup, architecture, how things have been done, and how Rubrik is helping us. The plan in the future is that certain teams will start using Rubrik in their application. I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10). Which deployment model are you using for this solution? Public Cloud If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use? Amazon Web Services (AWS) Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from We can retrieve data faster, trimming down our recovery time What is our primary use case? The primary use cases of Rubrik are to back up critical files, servers, documents, VMs, and partition drives from servers. We protect our Linux and Unix OSs. I am using both their physical appliances and software. We are using it on SaaS. How has it helped my organization? The SLA-based policy automation affects us greatly because we don't need to monitor it daily. We just allow the SLA to screen and do a daily checkup, e.g., if the SLA proceeded and or if it failed. This makes our work much easier. We use the archival functionality in terms of our cloud operations. Instead of buying extra hardware or extra large devices for Rubrik, we attached it and transferred our on-premise data to the cloud. We had a seamless connection from the AWS platform. What is most valuable? Lately, we appreciate the archival to cloud and search finder for restorations, where we don't need to back up or restore the overall backup of a drive. Instead, we just retrieve specific files from specific servers. Rubrik's web interface is user-friendly. It takes time to understand every aspect of the system and interface, but it is understandable and quite easy to use. It is seamless with fast backup storage. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Rubrik for around two years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? We have had some minor issues, but they have been solved. In terms of backup, it has been quite good and works as expected. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? I would rate the scalability as a three out of five because additional hardware is a must if in terms of infrastructure loads. In terms of archival functionality, the scalability is good because you can achieve that through cloud storage. We have four Rubrik clusters with 41 DB in them. I would assume that we are backing up around 100 terabytes of data from the company. We have three system administrators who handle the infrastructure side of the company. How are customer service and technical support? In terms of escalating tickets or bugs, they are very quick in terms of their support system. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We used a different solution called Legato, which is an old school tape backup solution. We switched to Rubrik because of: * Costs. * Time. * Hardware updates and outdated technology. Compared to the way that we were previously backing up different files and servers, using Rubrik is as easy as clicking a button, except using dates. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was straightforward. What about the implementation team? Rubrik's partner (Trend Micro) usually does the heavy work on it. It only takes around three to four hours to set up, depending on the company's infrastructure and security. We had a very good experience during the deployment process. What was our ROI? We were able to decrease the process around five minutes using Rubrik from a day's work. It trims down recovery testing time from eight hours to 10 to 15 minutes. In terms of usage, Rubrik has allowed us to retrieve data 80 to 90 percent faster than our previous technology. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We reviewed Commvault, Rubrik, and Dell EMC. Rubrik won out in stability, support, and functionality. What other advice do I have? Know your needs first and understand if Rubrik can provide the solution to your problems. In terms of backup, Rubrik is a top-notch technology. In terms of user-friendliness, UI, and the price, it is suitable for a company or startup to consider this solution. Time matters in terms of receiving and backing up data. Having a solution that can fit in terms of time management can help a company thrive. We don't actually backup cloud systems. We only do archival. We upload the on-premise data to the cloud. I would rate Rubrik as a 10 (out of 10). Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Reliable, easy to automate tasks, good PowerShell support What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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. What is most valuable? 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. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Rubrik for approximately three and a half years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? 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. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? 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 w... Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from It has a good interface which is simple to navigate and utilize What is our primary use case? The primary use for Rubrik in our environment is data backup and recovery. Also, Rubrik has a good interface which is simple to navigate and utilize. How has it helped my organization? Rubrik has improved our organization by minimizing downtime (in case of an incident was to occur). It also has quick backups helping us to stay current. What is most valuable? The best feature on Rubrik is the interface, as it is easy to use and navigate the program. What needs improvement? For Rubrik, though it does a great job, it needs to keep innovating to stay relevant in the data management field. For how long have I used the solution? One to three years. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-04-29T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from The solution is scalable to multiple petabytes What is our primary use case? We are doing a business with Rubrik. I am responsible for implementing the solution to our customers. Even though I am not trained for implementing, it is easy to use and easy to learn. We also get backups for our own environment. How has it helped my organization? We had some VMware issue as VMware did some changes on the AHCI drivers. Rubrik saved our environment those times. What is most valuable? * Instant recovery * Live mount What needs improvement? The open source database needs to be supported. What do I think about the stability of the solution? There are no issues with the stability. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The solution is scalable to multiple petabytes. Since we do not have that much data, the one which we are using is enough. How is customer service and technical support? 10 out of 10. Which solutions did we use previously? I used to use Veeam. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was straightforward. There is a bootstrap script, which does all the IP address initialization. for all the metadata disk preparation and service openings. What about the implementation team? We did the implementation by ourselves because the deployment and using it is straightforward. What was our ROI? I cannot provide that information. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The setup cost is a bit high, but the solution is an all-in-one solution. There is no licensing in terms of capacity. The TCO is lower if you buy it for two or three years. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We used Veeam before. What other advice do I have? It is a great product. Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:We are a distributor company in Turkey. I am responsible from the Technical team. I have extensive knowledge on Hyperconverged products.
Date published: 2017-11-26T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Management is so simple that anyone can check the backups and do restores when necessary What is our primary use case? Rubrik is being used at my organization for the backups of virtual and physical servers enterprise-wide. I no longer feel the need to babysit and monitor all of the backup jobs in the backup system. It simply works when it is supposed to, at all times. Live recovery is near instant and it handles all mounts through the appliance for rapid recovery. Spinning up test SQL servers from mounts are also great for our development team. How has it helped my organization? Management is so simple that anyone can check the backups and do restores when necessary. What is most valuable? Instant recovery because it takes about 10 seconds to restore the VM from backup to production, and also mounts from point in time. What needs improvement? It needs more storage array integration options and an easier restore for files that download using a browser. For how long have I used the solution? One to three years. How was the initial setup? Rubrik ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/rubrik ) is very simple to implement and setup. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-05-02T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from A Google-like file search, system scaling, and a frequent development cycle are some positives that this solution offers What is our primary use case? We are an MSP and offer Rubrik as a backup service to customers on private and public cloud environments and internally managed environments. We run the solution against VMware and Hyper-V with minimal physical systems. Currently, there is no support for image-level backups on systems in Azure and AWS from Rubrik. Presently we use agent-level backups however this is not ideal for fast whole system recovery. The next version (4.2) has support for image backups, and this will be investigated for functionality when released. How has it helped my organization? The legacy backup solution required large capital expenditure upfront and was not easy to scale, required a high degree of technical expertise to operate, and featured time-consuming upgrades which required a lot of troubleshooting post-upgrade. The system also had many limitations around the number of concurrent hot mount operations. Rubrik, on the other hand, is very easy to scale, can be operated by junior staff, and upgrades to date have been seamless. Each time we add a Brik we gain additional backup and restore performance. They claim performance at up to 30k IOPS per Brik, however, I suspect the actual figure to be below that. Having said that, we can instantly recover an entire customer's environment in minutes and run happily on the system until a storage vMotion is completed to production storage without any issues. Google-like file search is another invaluable tool to quickly find and restore files directly to your browser. This feature has saved significant time for end users who can’t remember where they saved a file. What is most valuable? * Google-like file search * System scaling * Ease of use/upgrade/addition of capacity. * Frequent development cycle which is typically 3 months between feature releases. * Direct feedback to product managers is invaluable, features we have requested are typically added to the next product release. * Product support team is excellent, with issues typically being resolved the same day. * Although not in large-scale use at the moment, the ability to convert a VMware image backup to an EC2 instance will be of great use moving forward to provide disaster recovery to the cloud when required. What needs improvement? * 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. For how long have I used the solution? Less than one year. What do I think about the stability of the solution? No What do I think about the scalability of the solution? No Which solutions did we use previously? Avamar with Data Domain, which was expensive and hard to manage, and had poor product updates. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was done in one to two hours, with racking the equipment being the most time-consuming part of the install. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? If you are unsure, get a POC unit and see how easy backups can be to manage, and how easy restores are. Which other solutions did I evaluate? Veeam, Avamar, and Cohesity. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-07-16T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Their support is always available and their response times are quick Excellent company to work with as they have strong pre-sales and engineering knowledge. Their support is always available and their response times are quick. The product is as good as advertised and totally changes the way enterprise businesses do data protection. Pros: * Easy implementation whether using their physical appliance or Edge VMs that can be deployed at smaller sites. * It works with VMware and Hyper-V without agent installation. * If you have physical servers or non-supported hypervisors (looking at you OVM), you can install the Rubrik Backup Service and create filesets and SLA to backup your data. Cons: * With multiple Rubrik clusters setup in an environment, it becomes painfully obvious that this product needs a central management console. With no single pane of glass, it is causing headaches trying to maintain dozens of Rubrik installations across a big corporate environment. * Missing features, such as role-based access with granular permission sets, are really hurting the product. This might be a non-issue with a smaller IT department, but for larger teams, the ability to be specific on permissions for Rubrik appliances is badly needed. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-11-20T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from It brought all of our backups under a single pane of glass and made recovery extremely simple What is our primary use case? We use it for backup and recovery of VMware servers, physical Windows servers, SQL Databases, and Microsoft Exchange. How has it helped my organization? Our previous backup solution was slow, unreliable, and difficult to manage. Rubrik has brought all of our backups under a single pane of glass and made recovery extremely simple. What is most valuable? Instant Recovery of VMs: We had a case where a SQL server had been rendered unusable. Rubrik had us back up and running in seconds. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? Less than one year. How is customer service and technical support? In the event of any issues or questions, the support is top-notch. We rarely need to use support, but when they are needed, they are always quick to respond and very knowledgeable. Which solutions did we use previously? We used Backup Exec and Veeam. We made the switch as we found Backup Exec was slow, unreliable, and difficult to manage. Having two solutions was also not ideal, and Rubrik met our needs perfectly. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was very straightforward. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Rubrik is at the pricier end of the market, but the setup and implementation are so simple that it just works. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We looked at Veeam with ExaGrid and Arcserve. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-06-06T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from It has greatly simplified our backup process What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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. What is most valuable? 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. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? Less than one year. What do I think about the stability of the solution? No stability issues. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? No scalability issues. How is customer service and technical support? We have had training sessions. We used customer support once, and they resolved the issue immediately. Which solutions did we use previously? We previously used EMC Avamar. The reason that we switched was cost, maintenance, and customer support. How was the initial setup? 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. What about the implementation team? 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. What was our ROI? To be determined. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The cost was less than our previous provider, and this is a much better product. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We looked into EMC's newest product, Veeam, and Cohesity. What other advice do I have? 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. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-07-01T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from You can set up policies by resource pools, clusters, and folders. The array can support high workloads. What is most valuable? It has a quick setup and then it is hands-off. It’s a backup product, and you want to set it up and forget about it. For the VMware side, you can set up policies by resource pools, clusters, and folders. This helps with the "set up and forget" process. They have added physical servers (Windows and Linux), plus SQL. This is a huge plus as everything can be managed under one policy. How has it helped my organization? VM backups are common and there are a lot of vendors. The thing that sets Rubrik apart is the instant recovery feature. While other vendors have this, the storage is on you. In my case, this storage was always on a cheap disk. With Rubrik, you get an array that can support high workloads until you have a main window from which you can migrate the VM back to production storage. Replication is also great. With one click of a button, you can replicate between Rubrik devices and public cloud storage. What needs improvement? The reporting can be vague, especially when something is failing. AD integration is cumbersome. For highly compliant environments, Rubrik does not patch the IPMI firmware on a regular basis. Be aware that you should design the roll-out with this in mind. Otherwise, your security teams will be calling about vulnerabilities that they can reach. For how long have I used the solution? We have used this solution for over two years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? There have not been any stability issues. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? There have not been any scalability issues. This is one of the pluses and a driver for buying Rubrik. If you need backups to run faster, or if you need more storage, you just add another node or Brik. How is customer service and technical support? The technical support is good. They will escalate quickly if it is needed. Which solutions did we use previously? We had other solutions before this one. We used Veeam and VMware backups. We left Veeam due to storage management. VMware backups were not as feature rich as Veeam or Rubrik. How was the initial setup? The installation is straightforward. You fill out the sheet with names and IPs, and Rubrik sets it all up. However, it does use a lot of network ports, at least one 10-gigabit and one 1-gigabit port per node. That adds up quickly with multiple Briks that can have four nodes each. Make sure you create different networks and segmentation. The IPMI 1-gigabit networks need to be locked down and not allow other networks to be routed to them. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Understand what you really need to backup. Do you need a backup, or can you use storage snaps? Run their PoC trial. It will give you a good idea of what your compression will look like and it will allow you to estimate the size you need. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We used Veeam and VMware before. We also looked at Commvault. What other advice do I have? Understand what you want to backup. Rubrik makes it very easy to go in and back up everything, but that might not be in your budget. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-01-22T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Instant recovery of virtual machines allows for the restoration of services in minutes What is our primary use case? We use the Rubrik solution to back up our private cloud environment with hundreds of virtual machines. How has it helped my organization? The old method of backup wasn't the right product for our cloud solution. The restore and backup times took to long. What is most valuable? The most important feature is the instant recovery of virtual machines. It allows us to restore services in minutes. What needs improvement? We need one system to manage all the Rubrik clusters. We are now looking into Rubrik Polaris as a solution. For how long have I used the solution? One to three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It's a very stable solution. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Not at all. How is customer service and technical support? All of the Rubrik engineers know everything about their products. Which solutions did we use previously? We used NetBackup in the past but it didn't fit with our new requirements. How was the initial setup? Straightforward. What about the implementation team? A Rubrik engineer configured the system for us at location. What was our ROI? The instant recovery is what we needed. I don't know the exact ROI. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I can't speak for others, but look at what you require in your environment. Which other solutions did I evaluate? NetBackup, Veeam and Cohesity What other advice do I have? Have a look at the Rubrik API Playground to automate a lot of processes. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-07-11T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Rubrik, Your One Stop Shop For Data Management & Peace of Mind How has it helped my organization? There have been many changes to how our organization has been able to approach backup and recovery thanks to Rubrik. We have been able to reduce the time for recovery, which is invaluable because it not only frees up our time to move on to other things, but it truly makes our customers feel that they are important and given “special treatment.” Typically, with the previous solutions we were using, it was owned fully by our engineering team, but we were able to train our admin team to take over all operational aspects of the product in less than two hours via a web conference thanks to the no-nonsense and easy-to-use product. This has also become our go-to solution for disaster recovery requirements for many of our applications. The great part is we don’t have to build out DR VMs to sit there and do nothing, instead, we can deploy a snapshot from production at the time of need instead. This not only saves the customer money, but it saves on bloat in our virtual environment. What is most valuable? First, lets start with what is Rubrik? Rubrik Cloud Data Management is a single, software fabric that manages all application data in the cloud, at the edge, or on-premises for many use cases, including backup, recovery, archival, analytics, development, and cloud. Rubrik takes the complexity of maintaining and managing your data and enables you to focus on other aspects of the business. The bottomline is if you have Rubrik, you have peace of mind. It’s hard to pick out a few features to list, but I will start with these: * Instant recovery: This has dramatically reduced our time to restore from over 20-30 minutes for a server to be recovered and back up and running, to less than 60 seconds. It’s a beautiful thing. * The search functionality is second to none as the speed of the search is fast across the whole system and predictive. * I also love the fact that I can apply an SLA domain to various areas (direct to VM, folder, cluster, etc.). I currently apply most SLA domains directly to a cluster so that we have a set-it-and-forget-it approach. When a new VM is added to that cluster, we KNOW that it is going to inherit the SLA domain and be backed up. * Lastly, Rubrik’s support team is phenomenal. Any time that we have had questions, issues or feature requests, the team responds rapidly and keeps you apprised of the progress without you having to follow-up all the time. What needs improvement? We have put in a feature request against their physical agent. Currently, the physical server agent will only back up folder structures and not truly give you the ability to restore to a bare-metal box. Well, we would love to see the physical agent have the ability to essentially P2V machines from the backup. This would be huge! It would assist in so many areas of our virtualization projects and especially during a DR scenario. If I could take a snapshot from a physical and be able to stand it up as a virtual immediately without the need to rebuild an entire system and restoring files, that would be HUGE. It would also give us the ability to get away from physical hardware, in general, when we go through to clean up older physical boxes that are no longer under service contract or need to be segregated for any reason. For instance, we have an initiative to get all 2003 physical servers left in our environment to a segregated cluster and we do use P2V to get them, so bypassing the P2V and just restoring a backup would speed that process up tremendously. What do I think about the stability of the solution? I have not encountered any instabilities with the product outside of limitations on the back end with our AD user object size. We have so many users that Rubrik has an issue handling so many objects, so it makes it difficult to use the RBAC features that were just released in the Firefly/3.0 code release. That being said, Rubrik support has been phenomenal working on this issue with the engineering team and we look forward to their solution very soon. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Scalability has been a great process, as we have gone through a few at this point. Rubrik handles everything. They will come onsite, upgrade the units, ensure all is working properly and it typically only takes a couple of hours. That being said, we have deployments in multiple locations and they do not currently have a management hub that allows you to manage multiple clusters from a single place. You have to go cluster to cluster to make changes. How is customer service and technical support? Rubrik’s technical support has been phenomenal! They are extremely quick to respond and 99% of the time, they are able to take care of everything behind the scenes via the Support Tunnel. They not only respond to emails almost instantaneously, they will contact us about potential issues before they happen. They have been extremely easy to understand on the phone and encourage you to write in, even with simple questions and feature requests. That has been huge, too: feature requests. We have put in numerous feature requests that were coded in amazing time, not that every feature request has come to fruition, but most have been at least put on the roadmap if they made sense globally. Which solutions did we use previously? We used many different products before going to Rubrik, including Tivoli and SnapManager, Nutanix Protection Domains, NetBackup, etc. They were all cumbersome and typically a pain to not only set up, but to recover from as well. By switching to Rubrik, we have been able to simplify many aspects of our backup and recovery procedures. On top of that, we were able to gain back valuable space on our Nutanix clusters, as we were finding in some instances that snapshots were taking up 50% of the available datastores, which we all know, with Nutanix, is NOT cheap. By switching, we were able to gain that space back for VM deployments instead of having to buy additional blocks as the constraint with Nutanix has typically always been the space, not the CPU and memory. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was extremely straightforward as Rubrik sends a field engineer out to handle everything. This goes for expansions as well. We had our initial two sites from the PoC stood up in less than two hours per site. The only reason it wasn’t faster was due to how locked down our network is. Other products we stood up at the same time took far longer to set up, and I mean one was two weeks before we could use it. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I would say that the biggest thing to keep in mind about the pricing, as it may be more expensive than other products you are looking at, is keep the operational ease in mind. Most of the other products we looked at would take far more time to manage, train and just in general use! So, when we compared the overall costs, Rubrik was cheaper because the engineering and operational side required FAR LESS dedication. So, all in all, they actually were cheaper than the competition. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We looked at many other products, including our existing solutions and products like Veeam and Cohesity. First off, Rubrik had the upper hand for the initial interest based on this... We have all gone through meetings to vet a new product of interest. During these meetings, you ask questions and get a lot of, “Oh, no one has ever asked that before” or “Let me get back to you on that,” whereas the Rubrik team had an answer for EVERY one of our questions, right then and there. That is a pretty rare thing in and of itself. That was a huge factor but obviously, the simplicity during the demo was a huge eye-catcher. What other advice do I have? I would highly recommend this product to ANY company who is concerned about their backup and recovery processes as well as DR scenarios. This product will simplify your life beyond belief. Not only that, you will be able to give the recovery process over to anyone, even if they don’t have a background in backup and recovery solutions. The fact that the product is so well thought out in its simplicity for end users, makes it easy to worry less about whether or not it’s doing its job. You will have much higher confidence that you will actually be able to recover the system you are working with, instead of, “I hope it’s been backed up properly.” It will change the way you view your data, especially if you are looking for an effective and simple way to handle disaster recovery. I have given this product a perfect rating for multiple reasons. The simplicity and ease of use are hands down better than any product we compared during the same PoC period. We have never had an issue with our system on the software or hardware side, other than an issue with the amount of objects their back end will handle for AD user authentication. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-02-20T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Mounting recent backups drastically cuts down required time. This solution features a file search across all backups What is our primary use case? We use Rubrik as a secondary recovery method for our Tier 1 applications and the primary recovery method for our Tier 2 and below applications. How has it helped my organization? The time it takes to manage Rubrik across our entire multi-site environment takes considerably less time that it has taken in the past to manage a single location. With Rubrik's integration into VMware, we don't have to worry about unprotected new servers or changes made to existing servers. What is most valuable? The file search feature across all backups has been helpful. The surprising use has been mounting recent backups to create new servers rather than cloning servers in VMware, which drastically cut down required time. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? One to three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? None whatsoever. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The only issue we have run into is the sizing of the Virtual Edge devices. In retrospect, we sized incorrectly and ran into the limits of the virtual device. If we had setup a physical cluster, we would not have had any issues at all. Which solutions did we use previously? We used EMC Avamar for many years. Cost and support were key reasons for the switch. What was our ROI? Initially we save several hundred thousand dollars on purchase/licensing. However the true ROI is hard to calculate when you start to look at the quality of the services/support offered. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Within a couple of days of a proof of concept, you'll be convinced that what they have been telling you is true. The sales team was great in putting together a thorough cost comparison. Which other solutions did I evaluate? The scope of our requirements limited the playing field. We did look at solutions like Veeam and Unitrends. However, we settled rather quickly with Rubrik. What other advice do I have? A proof of concept will answer all of your questions and sell itself. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-07-11T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from SLA-based functionality means we don't have to manually manage backup windows, and recovery times have been notably reduced What is our primary use case? We use Rubrik for VM backups, NAS backups, and SQL backups. Most of what we protect is virtual. It's AHV and VMware, primarily. We have a half dozen physical machines, but most of it is virtualized. We don't do any cloud-native protection yet, although we're about to start doing Office 365. We have the Brik as an on-prem piece and we offload all our data to Azure. How has it helped my organization? Not having to specify a time to run a backup with a fixed schedule is something that's really beneficial. In the past we had to schedule and try to manually stagger things over the window, to back up everything. Because Rubrik is SLA-based, you say, "Well, I need it to fit in this window here," and it just backs it up when it's most convenient for the Brik and for the third-party system. It looks at the CPU usage and says, "Okay, it's not as busy now. I know I've got time to take the backup." That's a real advantage. When it comes to its archival functionality, automatic is probably the best way to do it. You set it up in the SLA to archive the data, and tell it where to put it, and it just does it. You don't have to worry about it. You don't have to check it. It just works. That's true with a lot of Rubrik's functionality. The big thing, the big benefit, it gives us is that it just works. We don't have to handhold it or check it to make sure things are still working. It does just work. Another way it has improved our organization is recovery time. In the past, when we wanted to recover one of our SQL databases—our student record system is about 1.5 TB in size—to recover that from tape used to take about four or five days, and then get it onto a disk and have it visible in SQL Server. With Rubrik, when we've had to recover that, we've actually put it into the Live Mount capability. It runs on the Brik in the SSD layer. When we timed this, it took nine seconds to mount it so it was available in SQL Server and, within 30 seconds, it was out-performing production on queries. So within a minute you can have recovered what you might need to recover, rather than having to wait days to recover something. And if you have to completely replace the database, then you can migrate that over. Or if you have to just take some data out, you can just pull that out as well. It's an instant approach to database management, rather than having to worry about the time it takes to get data out. And when we've had to recover a backup of SQL data, it has reduced downtime. It's allowed us to get back up and running within 10 or 15 minutes, rather than having to wait days to recover something, especially where the state needed to be adjusted as well. The impact, the downtime, is much reduced now. When it comes to backup testing, we don't have to worry about validating that the backup has run. We can spin up a backup into Live Mount. We run our DBCC checks for SQL against the Live Mount instead of production. That helps protect the production platform performance, but it also allows us to validate that our backups are smooth and are recoverable as well. Having a backup is one thing, but proving that you can restore them has always been a bit tougher. So we pick databases on a weekly basis and recover those with Live Mounts to make sure that we can access the data in them. We also don't spend time managing backups now. That's the really important message. We used to have about half an FTE looking after our backup state, making sure jobs were running, or actually changing their tapes on a daily basis. That's all gone away now. If anything, it might be 0.1 FTE, just to just keep an eye on things occasionally. Some weeks there might be two days of stuff we might need to do, whether it's for upgrade prep and then doing an upgrade, or adding some new bits to the backup piece, or removing things as we decommission them. But it's more operational now, rather than actually managing the backup piece itself. It's just another part of the process. Part of the business case for us was the time it was going to save us in managing the backup, to add more value back into the organization. Rubrik has given us that half an FTE back. We don't have to worry now about what the backups are doing. We can actually now focus on other things. As a result, our IT security posture has improved because we've realigned that resource to improve our IT security resource count. We're now being more proactive with our security stances. We are able to use our resources more efficiently. The Polaris, SaaS-based framework for extracting metadata is what the ransomware product actually is surfacing. You have the core Polaris product which is the GPS, and then Radar is actually in that. We do have Sonar as well, which is the data classification product search, to look for data that shouldn't be in certain places. The benefit of Polaris is that I don't have to be onsite to look at that. I can log in remotely. It allows me to have visibility of what we're doing in terms of our backups. That's particularly true if we have a ransomware alert that is triggered in the early hours. When I wake up I can have a look at that alert through the Polaris interface, rather than having to log in to my laptop and onto the VPN to get into the CDM product. Polaris is really helpful in giving us the agility. The Sonar piece really helps because it allows us to look for data that shouldn't be in certain places, and it even helps the efficiency of platforms. For example, when our HR product creates the payroll, it actually creates a copy of that temporarily on the HR platform. When it's processed, it should be deleted or moved into archive. But when we ran Sonar against the HR platform, we actually identified that a lot of the data hadn't been tidied up as part of that process. So if that server had been compromised by either internal or external access, it would have potentially allowed a lot of that sensitive data to be leaked out. It's helped them to change their processes to look after the data better. What is most valuable? It backs up everything to Azure, so we no longer have to worry about tapes. When we went into lockdown, as a response to COVID, we didn't have to think about, "Well, we need to send people into the site to change backup tapes." That all carried on working. We could do a lot more remotely than we would have been able to do otherwise. We also have the Radar product for ransomware detection. That looks for anomalies in our backups and will trigger an alert if it sees something that is an abnormal amount of change. That could be lots of deletes or modifications, compared to normal. Or it could be some VMs that have suddenly had a lot of folders added or deleted. We haven't had anything so far, at least, that was problematic, but it's nice to know that it's keeping an eye on how much change is happening with backups and helping us identify problems. It can detect when someone has gone in and deleted a substantial amount of data on a VM. If that's abnormal it will flag it and say, "Well, you might want to investigate this." Our finance was doing a big refresh of non-production data. They deleted a load of log data and the app flagged it and said, "Well, this is strange activity. You might want to just check this out." I referred that to the finance team and they said, "Yeah, we're just refreshing the VMs, that's okay." That was cool, because we moved on. But if they had said, "Well, no one has touched that for months," then we would have looked at it in a bit more detail to see what it could have been. But without that alert, we wouldn't have any clue that anything happened. It's helping us keep an eye on what's normal and not on the estate. It's worth it because it doesn't always have to be external actors that are causing problems. You could have somebody internal being malicious if they're looking to leave or dissatisfied in their role, for example. It helps keep an eye on those situations as well. Its web interface is really easy to use. It's just click and go. It's fast and intuitive. We've never had any problems in navigating. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I've been using Rubrik for nearly three years now. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It hasn't gone down yet. Even when we've had a power problem, and the Brik actually lost power because our UPS is failing, we turned it back on and it just picked up where it left off and carried on. It does just work and it's intelligent enough to rebalance itself as well. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Because it's hyper-converged, we can just add additional Briks and nodes to give extra capability. We introduced an edge appliance to our setup. We installed it, added it to the cluster, and it picked up some of the workloads. It was so simple, a bit like Nutanix. The fact that it is all hyper-converged means the whole scaling piece is so much simpler compared to 3D architecture. It's just plug and go. It's only within our IT department that there is access to the product. There are about a dozen people who can use it. But the ser... Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-02-07T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Easy to use with an intuitive web interface, helpful support, good performance, and saves us time What is our primary use case? Our primary use case is on-premises backup and cloud DR. We're using the Rubrik appliance with their CDM technology for our on-premises solution. We are also using their CloudOut technology to leverage their cloud DR as part of their offering. We're backing up Windows infrastructure and on-premises applications such as SQL and Exchange file servers, and we're storing that locally on their appliance. Then, we replicate our environment to the cloud so that in the event of a true disaster, where we lost our physical infrastructure, we'd be able to spin up in the cloud, using their CloudOut technology. This would allow us to be up and running in the cloud until we were able to get infrastructure back online. The environments that we are backing up are physical and virtual. We don't have any cloud-native environments, so we're not doing any cloud backups right now. We use the cloud, although it is a DR target. Our main task is VM backup, which is between 75% and 80%. We have a few physical boxes that we're backing up, as well. For example, I have the actual hypervisors to back up, and then a few miscellaneous other servers that haven't been virtualized. The applications and servers that we protect include Microsoft Hyper-V for our virtualized infrastructure, Microsoft SQL server for the SQL side, and all of the other infrastructure, in terms of applications, that is Windows-based. We are very invested in the Microsoft platform and using Rubrik to back all aspects of that up. We do have a couple of Linux-based services running, but I would say that we're 95% Windows-based, whether that's Hyper-V VMs or Microsoft SQL, or Microsoft file servers or IAS app servers. How has it helped my organization? One of the ways that Rubrik has improved the way our organization functions is time savings. Coming off of the backup solution we had before, we were spending several hours a week, every day sometimes, dealing with backups that fail. Other issues include trying to make space or deal with an archive target that was offline. We were just spending a lot of time on it. Being a smaller team, when we spend time just dealing with the backups, that takes away from us being able to work on other projects that support the business growth and support other functions within the organization. With Rubrik, there'll be weeks sometimes that I never log into it. Maybe two, three weeks at a time, I never log into Rubrik because we get email alerts and they have great error handling. If there's an error or something happens, we get an email. A lot of times, the appliance will take care of itself and then deal with that missed backup, or whatever happened. But that's very rare. It'll go for several months without having an error. A lot of times, the errors are not a Rubrik issue. It's always that Windows did something that caused the backup to fail and Rubrik reruns it, then it works. Not having to spend any time in the console because we can rely on the alerting and automated reporting has allowed us to focus on other areas of the business and not deal with backups. Essentially, it gives us peace of mind that Rubrik works. It was definitely a change to get used to, not logging in to it. We buy this really cool piece of technology and turns out that we're not in it a whole lot, but that just goes to show Rubrik has a robust solution that we can depend on. This product has definitely increased productivity because we're not dealing with backups. They work on their own and it does its thing. We made the investment into Rubrik to not have to deal with backups and it delivers on that. This leaves us time to focus on other things because we're not dealing with a backup that failed. It is difficult to put an exact number on the amount of time that we're saving by using Rubrik, although, with our previous solution, there were weeks where we had to spend several hours dealing with failed backups. On a bad week, it may have been between six and eight hours. On average, by not dealing with backups at all, we are saving several hours a week. Using the SLA-based policy automation has simplified our data protection operations. We are no longer scheduling backups or trying to figure out availability, or time slots, where we can back up our systems. For example, we don't have to consider things like we've got backups running at 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, or 3:00 AM, and we're trying to find a slot. Instead, the SLA engine that they have is super easy to use and does that job for us. It was really good for us to move to the SLA-based approach from a traditional backup because we were able to, for business use, cover tasks such as retaining email for one year. In their SLA engine, it's very easy to find that. Another example might be backing up a set of test-SQL servers where we only need 14 days. Through the policy engine, you set what you want the retention to be and it takes care of scheduling and managing those backups. Once we have them set, they are stable and continue to work because we don't change SLAs often. We define the retention that we need for each app and each service, and then it just works. Overall, the SLA-based approach makes it very easy to achieve your backups. Luckily, we have not used their ransomware recovery. We've not had any incidents or ransomware where we needed to, but we have tested recovering assets in the event that happens and we've always been able to recover in our test scenarios, in our tabletop exercises. This is the type of feature that you never want to rely on outside of testing because it means that you're having a bad day, so hopefully, we never have to use it. That said, if we do have to, we're confident that it would deliver. Similar to the case with ransomware, we have been lucky in that we haven't had any major disasters where we had to fully recover anything. In the usual case, where files are lost because something is overwritten, or something gets deleted, it has definitely saved a lot of time with the instant recovery. Using the predictive file search, we're able to put those files or directories back or roll back a database in a few minutes. It's very quick and has definitely reduced our recovery time. We've not had to do a lot of restores, but when we do have to restore the occasional file or put a database version back, it's very quick and has saved us quite a bit of time from what the old Unitrends system would have looked like. This product has also saved us time with respect to managing backups. Prior to Rubrik, every day of the week, we were spending an hour or two hours or sometimes longer dealing with backups, and that's now completely gone. There are some times that we go for weeks and don't even log into the appliance because we get the reports and they tell us everything we need. We trust Rubrik because we've had it long enough now that we know that when it says it completed the backup, the backup's there, and if we need it, we can get it back. What is most valuable? The most valuable feature is the Instant Recovery, where we can restore a VM or SQL database or any server or application, and have it up and running on their appliance within a few seconds. The recovery time of the instant restore is instantaneous and there is no complexity to it. What we're recovering doesn't matter to them, and we don't have to wait for it to mount a recovery image or do anything like that. When they say instant, they mean instant. The ease of use is important to us, as well. It's super easy to get set up. Within a few hours of them deploying the on-premises appliance, we were backing up data locally into the cloud and able to test restores. Rubrik is really good about releasing updates and we have had no issues with the process. They make it very easy, working with their support when they do put out an update, and they assist with doing the health checks beforehand to ensure that there are no issues. They do a pre-flight check on those updates to ensure that they're compatible with the appliance. Then, we schedule a time off-hours to apply it. They are normally pretty quick and we've never had issues where we had to roll back. They've always been flawless updates. The CloudOut technology allows us to replicate data in our environment to the cloud, and then it can be spun up and used in the cloud if our physical environment is not available. The VM backup and the SQL backup are blazingly fast for both backup and recovery. The web interface is really good. and it's only gotten better with every update. It was good, to begin with, but they've improved the speed and added features in each update. It is a modern interface that works in any browser, and we can get to it from a tablet or computer. The type of device you access it from doesn't matter because it fits all screens, and it's intuitive and easy to use. The archival functionality is very good. It is very easy to archive data to the cloud, and this is something that we were looking for. You can do it all from their web interface, which is a plus. You don't have to jump into the command-line interface or run scripts or anything to make it work. It is all configurable in the UI and very easy to dump data off to the cloud and pull backups back from the cloud archives. We have used the predictive search functionality and hands down, it's the easiest way that I've ever recovered files. It's just like searching Google, but it searches your own files for recovery. It's easier than if you told somebody you could use a Google-like search to recover files, I don't think they would believe you until they've used Rubrik, because it does work that well. It's quick to search, no matter if you're searching a VM or even a physical box, it works across them. With their new global file search in the latest version of their CDM, you don't eve... Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-05-05T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Reduced recovery time, improved productivity, and features excellent technical support What is our primary use case? Our primary use case is to back up our physical and virtual environments. The solution is deployed both on-prem and in the cloud. We use Rubrik to protect virtual, physical, and cloud-native environments. The types of systems and applications protected by the solution include VMs, SQL, NOS servers, and Office 365. How has it helped my organization? The solution reduced the time we spend on recovery testing, and the Live Mount feature greatly helps with that. We can instantly restore required files without needing a traditional recovery, and depending on the type of file, we can have time savings of 50-70%. The solution reduced our recovery time by 20-30%; we noticed a gradual difference compared to other tools. In terms of overall productivity, we have fewer people working on backup, which significantly improves productivity. The backups with Office 365 happen seamlessly, and I can manage all the native Microsoft solutions in a single pane. What is most valuable? The Live Mount feature is excellent; it's useful for the backup administrator and end user. The SLA-based policy automation is very effective in cloud archiving, as we have archives in the cloud. Regarding the solution's archival functionality, there is a Hot and Cold Tier concept, a handy feature we can implement within Rubrik. We used the solution's Polaris, SaaS-based framework for extracting metadata, and the compliance and governance are excellent, especially during audits. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I've been using Rubrik for three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? Native Rubrik is stable, but we have struggled a lot with stability in our recently installed cloud-based instance of the solution. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The solution is scalable, and it's straightforward to scale. We have around ten users, including database and server administrators, plus security staff. Most users have read-only access, and a few have write access too. How are customer service and support? The technical support in India is excellent; they are quick to respond and resolve issues. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? I previously used Commvault and EMC NetWorker. We switched because Rubrik is more affordable and user-friendly. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was straightforward, and it took approximately one hour to get up and running. There are many background steps to take regarding network configuration. I carried out the deployment and perform the maintenance for the solution by myself. What was our ROI? With this kind of product, we get an ROI when a problem occurs, but we haven't faced any outages or ransomware. The recovery and backups are there, but thankfully, we haven't encountered a situation where we needed them. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? We use Rubrik Go, the provider's evergreen subscription purchasing program, and it's affordable. There are additional costs for add-ons, and they recently upgraded a new cluster, which also carries a price. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We evaluated Veeam and are considering looking at it again, as the virtualization is better, and Rubrik has some issues with Azure. What other advice do I have? I rate Rubrik nine out of ten. I highly recommend the solution as it's very user-friendly and easy to work with out-of-the-box; there's nothing complex about it. We have yet to integrate Rubrik with other solutions, but we plan to integrate it with vCenter. The solution didn't save us time on managing backups as such, but the UI is very user friendly. We do not use the solution's ransomware recovery. I have yet to learn if Rubrik reduces downtime because we haven't faced that issue. Whenever I did a test restore, it happened so quickly that we didn't really have downtime. Disclaimer: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2022-11-22T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Allows us to back up virtual machines and databases and provides more ease of management and fewer issues on an ongoing basis What is our primary use case? I use this solution to back up virtual machines and databases. We started to use Rubrik because we wanted more ease of management and fewer issues on an ongoing basis. The solution is deployed on-premises. We have physical nodes at our main data centers and virtual nodes at our remote sites. How has it helped my organization? This solution gave us more time to work on other tasks. For a lot of issues that come up, we have support look into them and give us direction instead of us spending a lot of time investigating them. What is most valuable? The web-based approach is the most valuable feature. What needs improvement? There could be better reporting and better filtering. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using this solution for three and a half years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The stability is excellent. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? They sell hardware processing and discs, so if you want more disc space, you have to buy more processing. But I understand the model, so we're fine with it. We have plans to increase usage because our company is growing. How are customer service and support? The technical support is excellent. I would rate technical support 10 out of 10. I work with them on an almost daily basis. They tunnel in and find out what's going on. They answer quickly, and they don't get frustrated by the number of questions I ask them. They escalate it when necessary. They've been excellent. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We previously used Commvault. It was a pretty complex setup. There were a lot of hardware, servers, and issues that were hard to troubleshoot. How was the initial setup? The networking wasn't straightforward because of the way our network is designed, but it was pretty straightforward after that. For deployment, we only needed two people: myself and a networking colleague. One of my responsibilities is to design policies. This solution requires regular maintenance, and I'm the primary person who manages it. For a product like this, you need high-speed connectivity to your virtual environments and database servers. What about the implementation team? We used professional services from Rubrik. Our experience with them was good. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? We're okay with the price. There are additional costs like maintenance, and there are some features on their central management piece that don't come with our licensing. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We also looked at Cohesity. The main difference is that Rubrik is more web-based, has a more active customer support model, and is less complex. What other advice do I have? I would rate this solution 10 out of 10. We're very happy with them. They have an excellent sales and technical support team. For those who are evaluating this solution, my advice is don't underestimate the importance of excellent customer service. The biggest lesson I've learned from using Rubrik is to make sure I take as many security precautions as possible to protect my backups. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2022-08-01T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Cut our backup management time significantly, and near-instant recovery reduces our downtime What is our primary use case? We came from two different systems. We had one product that was for our campus side and a different product for the hospital side. We wanted to bring those together and not have too many products in one environment. Rubrik covers everything in our VMware, for both campus and hospital. It does all of our backups. Anything that gets backed up for either side now goes through it. We were siloed out into many different teams on both sides and we had a backup team on campus and a backup team on the hospital side. When those were brought together, the backup teams were dissolved and they were put into the VMware side where they're now managing hardware and server hardware refreshes. My team is now the storage and backup team and we've taken on that task. Backups are offered as part of pretty much any ticket requesting a new server, for campus or hospital, that is a request for a new server. We spin up the backup at the server creation. Our Rubrik is all on-prem. We back up our VMware environment and we also do a few physicals. We do some SQL and we do some Oracle. How has it helped my organization? It depends on what we're recovering, but some recoveries, before Rubrik, would take 30 minutes-plus. Now, similar recoveries that we've done have taken only seconds. Also, when we first put this into place, we were actually moving to a hybrid cloud approach as well. We were trying to offer server creation as a simple ticket. We were doing this through offering the products, the catalog, and the automation behind everything to spin up the servers and deal out the storage. The two products that we actually have in our environment weren't very friendly with that automation piece but Rubrik, with its SLA policies, makes it very easy for us to say, "Hey, if this is a tier-zero application, we want this SLA applied globally," although there aren't very many of those in our environment. And if it's a tier-one application we can say, "Oh, we want this SLA applied." It does a very good job of keeping things clean in our environment. We also went through making sure we have everything tagged in VMware so that Rubrik can just pull that tag and apply that SLA. So things work pretty smoothly with all of that together. We use the archival functionality. We tend to keep things on a Brik for a certain amount of time and, of course, it's a larger amount of time for tier-zero applications. And then we archive off to a private cloud that we have here at the university. That definitely keeps costs down because we have a deep and cheap storage solution for that cloud, Hitachi Content Platform. That was one of the main reasons that we went with Rubrik, as well, as it is compatible with HCP. We have quite a few petabytes of that and we wanted to make sure that we could leverage that and use it to our advantage. Another benefit has been that management time has gone down significantly. Before, we had those two teams, one team for NetBackup and one team for Commvault. Each of those teams had two people on them. Now, we have one person on the storage team who is dedicated pretty much to backups, and the rest of us jump in as needed. We've really been able to consolidate that effort, and since it's an easy to use interface, we were able to pick up and run with that as a storage team. But with NetBackup before, we did have to build out quite a few servers and other stuff to get it into HCP. The whole model behind that, having lots of media servers, was very costly when you add in all of the hardware costs, licensing, et cetera. With this, it's quite a bit cheaper. And Rubrik has definitely reduced downtime, because if we can spin up a recovery faster to that local CPU and the storage of Rubrik and have it up instantly, we can definitely get back to work sooner. What is most valuable? We do like the instant recovery because, beforehand, we would tell people, "Hey, it's going to take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to spin this up and, in that time, we're going to need your help with certain questions." We would sit there and work with them, but it always took quite a while. Now, we say, "Okay, give me 15 seconds and I can get this back up for you." And within that 15 seconds it's on and the only thing that we have to do afterwards is vMotion it off of the Rubrik storage back to where it should rest. We also like the web interface. We mainly log in to the node and work from that, but occasionally we will log in and look at things when offsite. It's very intuitive and it works really well. In addition, the solution's APIs play in with our automation piece for hybrid cloud. We wanted everything to work without manual interaction. We wanted everything to just play through when a ticket is submitted and automatically spin up the backup that we wanted, based on the tag in the VMware object. Our VMware team was the one that mainly looked at those APIs and built all of that out, but they haven't had any issues with it. It's worked exactly as designed. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? We've been using Rubrik for about a year and a half to two years now. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The stability has been good. We don't run into a ton of issues on it. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The scalability is wonderful. That is one of our biggest advantages with this. We can scale out as big or as small as we need to. We went with 20 nodes or so at the start and we've got over 40 now. We continue to expand as needed. We're still not all the way done with rolling this out to replace everything, but every year we're getting more and more nodes in there and replacing more and more. We've covered about 85 percent of our environment. With the other 15 percent, it wasn't that Rubrik couldn't handle it, it's that the budget only allows for so many nodes to be purchased at a time. On top of that, we need to make sure that we do it in a way that's non-disruptive for work, and there are some teams that would be affected by disruption. We need to go a little bit at a time, which is what we've done. For the future, I do see us using it more. We have been doing a soft launch on Oracle, because we needed the tool that Rubrik has that allows for integration. That was still in something of an early stage of development, and we weren't comfortable putting it into production until it was in a more developed state. So we have used Rubrik to back up Oracle, but we've gone about using less of the automation pieces that Rubrik offers, and we're using it more as just a landing spot until that is fully developed. That's about the only piece that we're going to use more in the future. How are customer service and technical support? When we have run into issues, we've reached out to our support team at Rubrik and they've been very quick to respond. Whether they're in the office or not, they do take our calls and help us out. It's always a quick response. They're a newer company, so I'm sure they're still establishing their place, but the escalation teams and everybody that we've worked with have been capable and they've been able to fix our problems without having to bring in too many people. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We had Commvault and NetBackup before. Both of those were based on costly consumption-based licenses, and our CIO really disliked that model. The licenses that we had had been increasing in cost year after year and it just wasn't feasible to keep two separate products that weren't a good fit for the automation piece, for hybrid cloud. And they were on a slightly more pricey model. So rather than going to one or the other, we went out to see if there was anything that made more sense at the time. And that's when we found Rubrik. With Rubrik, we have an agreement where it isn't license-based, and we are able to add more Briks as needed and more clusters as needed. It makes it extremely easy to expand our backup environment as the need arises. With the other models out there, you would buy one quota and then you would hit it and prices would change and other things would happen. They have you locked in, no matter what. It was basically a situation where you had to pay whatever price they said you had to pay. With Rubrik, it's been very nice to have all of the equipment in our own data center and to have a little bit more control. For example, if we think we're going to need this much next year, this is what the hardware cost is going to be, and we can pay for any additional capacity that we need. That's been really nice with Rubrik. How was the initial setup? Setting up Rubrik was both a little bit straightforward and a little bit of complex. We had the team that sold us the product there with us during setup and we went to add in all of the nodes at the same time. That was something that even that team had thought we could do, and then they remembered, in the middle of adding all the nodes at the sam... Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-02-21T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Saves us time managing backups and improves our team's overall productivity What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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. What is most valuable? 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. What needs improvement? 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. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? 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. How are customer service and technical support? 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. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? 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. How was the initial setup? 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. What was our ROI? 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. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? 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. What other advice do I have? 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. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-09-13T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Lowers our overall management costs and provides single pane of glass management What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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. What is most valuable? * 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. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using it for three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? 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. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? 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. How are customer service and technical support? 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. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? 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. How was the initial setup? 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. What about the implementation team? 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. What was our ROI? 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. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? 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. Which other solutions did I evaluate? 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. What other advice do I have? 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). Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-02-02T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Live Mount allows me to spin up copies of my current system in a development state, takes me 80 percent less time to manage my backup environment What is our primary use case? Rubrik is our primary backup solution for production and development systems. We also use it for testing purposes when we need to spin off a temporary non-production environment. The solution protects some of our VM's, SQL, and even physical appliances. How has it helped my organization? A definite improvement using Rubrik has had on our organization is that it cuts down the operational time spent in the backup world, equaling fewer support calls and less time spent on engineering the product. This is because everything essentially functions straight out of the box. SLA-based policy automation is easy to use and easy to customize. It has made day-to-day operations a lot simpler because of the simplicity in creating SLA procedures. It saves us time. What is most valuable? The Live Mount is one of the most valuable features since it allows us to spin up copies of our current systems in what is just basically a development state. The Rubrik archival functionality is also a good feature that works well and is definitely useful. What needs improvement? The integrated reporting is not really that nicely built. The reporting functionality could definitely be a little bit more customizable from an administration perspective, with an easier to understand interface. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Rubrik for four years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? Rubrik is definitely a stable product. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? I consider Rubrik scalable because all you need to do is add another Brik and it's seamless. At this point we have adopted it 100 percent, so we do not have plans to increase its usage. How are customer service and technical support? I have found Rubrik's technical support to be extremely knowledgeable and easily accessible. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? Prior to using Rubrik we used Commvault. We switched solutions because of the features, the simplicity of the product, and its speed. I'm spending less time managing the solution. I would estimate that Rubrik recovery testing saves us 80% in time as compared to our prior solution. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Rubrik's support is definitely on the expensive side, but I consider it to be top of the line. We incur no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees. Which other solutions did I evaluate? Needless to say, we evaluated Commvault, as we were making use of it at the time. Other solutions we evaluated include Veeam and Dell. I think it was the ease of use, reliability, and scalability of Rubrik that influenced our decision. What other advice do I have? The Rubrik web interface is really easy to use. Three or four people work on Rubrik in operational roles. In addition, our use of Rubrik Polaris, which is a SaaS-based framework, is showing good savings in the time it takes us to manage backups. In response to customer feedback, Rubrik has already implemented an improvement which enables you to restore Active Directory at a more granular level. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-05-10T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Easy to use with minimal training required, innovative, good support What is our primary use case? We predominantly use Rubrik to back up VMware, VMs, SQL databases, Windows files, NAS data, and EC2 instances in Azure VMs. We have two data centers with Rubrik installed on the bricks in those locations. Then, we have virtual nodes installed that are at customer sites. We are using it for AWS and a little bit of Azure, as well. Rubrik covers my need for backup and disaster recovery for customers. We back up in our primary data center, replicate data to a secondary data center, and provide hot mount capabilities for customer VMs in the event of a disaster. We also use it for long-term archiving of on-premises customer workloads. How has it helped my organization? The SLA-based automation is a lot easier than worrying about what time we schedule jobs and what job needs to run at what time. Having the system determine the priority and scheduling jobs to meet compliance has made it a lot easier. We have used the Ransomware Recovery feature and it is good. However, I think that it lacks a management-type reporting dashboard. It could be used to show the value in the product because generally, until something happens, it's seen as something that sits in the back end and you wonder if it's ever providing value. It has reduced the time we spent recovery testing. We can now automate using a script rather than a human. To do this, we utilize the APIs in PowerShell for generating those automation test restores. We have a self-service portal for our customers, so our customers can log in and restore files themselves. Previously, that wasn't a capability that was available. In terms of time-saving, it's massive because if we can provide that functionality down to a customer and the customer can restore themselves, it's taken a hundred percent of the workload off of us and empowered the customer to do what they want to do. What is most valuable? The ease of use and innovation are the features that stand out for us. It provides the capability to drive down to the end-user, service desk level one, and use the system with minimal training. The web interface is excellent, and we really like it. The Google search, capability for file restore, and the ability to integrate the API into third-party products are really good. The archival functionality is excellent, supporting all the major cloud vendors. For our situation, it supports pretty much all of the archival methods that we would want to use for long-term retention. We archive data for up to seven years. We have used the API support for integration with vCloud director to create a tenant self-service portal. Our next project will be looking into automation with ServiceNow. We have used the predictive search feature and it drastically reduces the time it takes to find and restore data for people. It used to take perhaps hours to hot mount an image and then search it for a file. Now, we use the Google-like search to look not only across an individual VM but across the whole environment, with all of the VMs. We can find any file across terabytes of data in under 30 seconds and have a restore done, depending on the size of the file, in generally under five minutes. What needs improvement? The Office 365 protection could be improved. Specifically, the design of deploying a Kubernetes cluster to Azure for protecting Office 365, and only being able to protect in Azure Blob storage, is something that should be improved. Our preference would be to protect external to Azure. We could backup using the local bricks or appliances that we already have from Rubrik or alternatively, have the capability to protect out to AWS using alternative storage that's not visual-based. For how long have I used the solution? I have been working with Rubrik for three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? Stability-wise, it is really good. We've only ever had one node that needed to be rebooted, which didn't affect the uptime of the system. Excluding upgrades, we've had 100% uptime on the system for the past three years. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The scalability is excellent. We've regularly increased the capacity of Rubrik as we onboard new customers. Between 30 and 40 people in the company probably use Rubrik, but that's obviously not every day because we have different staff on different rosters, and, being an MSP, we support multiple customers. From our side, we probably have a higher touchpoint of Rubrik given that we are supporting customers that are using it. How are customer service and technical support? Our experience with technical support has been really good. Feature requests are predominantly what we're asking for, and every single time that we've ever asked, the engineering team's been really good at incorporating those features into future product releases. Being able to meet with the engineering teams on the future design of the UI and the actual functionality of the product has been really good. Having that direct contact with engineering and being able to drive what we want the product to do has been really helpful, and we see that come out in a frequent cadence. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? Previously, we had an Avamar data domain backup environment. It meant that anytime we had capacity constraints, what would happen was that Dell would come in and say that it was just as cheap to buy a new unit as it was to upgrade the existing one. It was always a big sell to supply the customer the newest and greatest thing, which sort of capped out at a certain capacity and couldn't really be expanded past that point. Being an MSP, having expansion capabilities was really key for us. Having the ability to just add nodes, and have that capacity online inside 30 minutes was really fantastic. We know that the investment being made into the existing equipment isn't dead in the water, having to be thrown away later. Implementing Rubrik has saved us time and money in managing backups, and I estimate that we've saved approximately 80% in terms of time compared to previously. This was in maintaining the system and doing upgrades. In terms of cost, we have had to hire a very expensive backup administrator that was really well versed in the Avamar product, and we constantly had problems with the upgrades once they were done. So, to move down to a lower-skilled and lower-cost resource, and have the task be completed in less time, was a significant dollar saving. In the past, when we did upgrades, we could be offline for a week troubleshooting. Now, once we do an upgrade, we're back to doing backups within half an hour to an hour. We switched for ease of use, the total cost of ownership, and the cost to maintain. It came down to the financial benefits and the time benefits and in terms of ease of use and customer self-service. There were a significant number of reasons why we switched to Rubrik from the other platforms. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was very easy. The longest time it took to deploy was getting the network team to configure network ports for us, and the IP addressing. Once that was done, we were up and running within 30 to 40 minutes of the initial deployment. Starting with the racking and stacking in the data center, the entire deployment probably took half a day for half a petabyte of data protection. To develop our implementation strategy, we had an initial meeting with Rubrik on the design and requirements from their side, in terms of network connectivity requirements and IP addresses. We had done a little bit of pre-work with the network team to get that up and running, and ready for plugin once the equipment was delivered. What about the implementation team? Two of our staff were all that was required. You just need enough to lift and stack the equipment in the data center. We had assistance from a systems engineer at Rubrik. We don't have anyone dedicated to day-to-day maintenance. I utilize my cloud staff to do the upgrades when required, but once the SLAs are configured, it almost runs itself. My service desk staff does the day-to-day backup checks and restores if needed. What was our ROI? Our ROI against the other products was within the first six to twelve months. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? When we originally started using Rubrik, it was under an MSP program, where we were paying a subscription fee for the consumption of the appliance. We've since switched over to outright purchase and buy as we need. The pricing has been quite good from our perspective, in terms of being able to negotiate with the Rubrik team to get the product that we want and be able to sell that out to our end customers. I can't complain, but nonetheless, I'll always say it could be cheaper. There are no additional costs in addition to the standard licensing fees that we're aware of. We haven't implemented the Sonar feature at this stage because it cannot be licensed on a per-customer basis. Rubrik has a multi-tenant functionality, and given that we're an MSP, we provide that capability to our customers. However, Sonar is an all-or-nothing addition, so given the cost of that, we wouldn't be able to sell that to all of our customers. In fact, that is one of our pain points at this time. We would like to be able to enable it on a per-customer tenant basis. Which other solutions did I evaluate? --------------... Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2021-03-18T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Significant backup time savings, user-friendly, stable, and good support What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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%. What is most valuable? 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. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? We have been a Rubrik customer since 2017. What do I think about the stability of the solution? 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. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? 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. How are customer service and technical support? 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. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? 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. How was the initial setup? 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. What about the implementation team? 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. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? As a technical person, I don't have the details, but from what I have heard, it can be expensive. Which other solutions did I evaluate? I did not personally evaluate other products but my colleague, who was handling the project, evaluated Veeam and Cohesity. What other advice do I have? 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. Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-03-16T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Driving Automation With Rubrik's API-First Architecture What is our primary use case? This project initially started out as a replacement for our legacy backup system, IBM Tivoli, which was backing up our VMware environment. Since our environment is almost entirely virtualized, protecting those assets was the primary goal. We also knew that we wanted to get to a state where our backups were protected against ransomware via immutability or air gapped backups, which we've now accomplished with Rubrik. Shortly after the initial deployment, we realized the full capabilities of Rubrik. We are utilizing Rubrik's backup integration with Oracle databases and SQL databases. There are several other business critical applications, like Tableau, that are also being protected via Rubrik. Due to Rubrik's ability to execute in protecting our on-premises assets in the data center, we decided to utilize Rubrik's Office 365 and AWS Cloud Native solution to protect our data in the cloud. How has it helped my organization? The SLA-based policy automation has streamlined our data protection operations. We have moved away from backup windows and moved to letting the SLA policy actually determine when is the most efficient time to do backups. We apply the SLA based on business rules to certain artifacts or entities within our environment and let Rubrik run with it. It has been extremely efficient and has cut down on the operational overhead of managing backups. In addition, we have absolutely seen a reduction in the time we spend on recovery testing. We have automated the validation of backups for our tier-one assets using Rubrik's API. We're seeing about a 62 percent TCO savings and 90 percent management time savings since switching to this solution. And we've reduced the data center footprint, which comes with operational overhead, by 75 percent since switching from Tivoli. Since acquiring Rubrik's Polaris GPS offering, we have further increased our productivity by utilizing SLA policies that extend across clouds and multiple on-premises data centers. What is most valuable? It's hard to specify a feature that is most valuable. The overall architecture is where we find the most value. Having an API-centric approach has allowed us to utilize a lot of automation to trigger the capabilities of Rubrik. This helps us minimize the operational overhead of managing and restoring backups. We have integrated Rubrik with our ticketing system and have some custom triggers to present Dev/Test environments from Rubrik to our development team. The web interface is extremely intuitive and, with recent changes to the API, it has become more responsive than it was when we initially implemented the product two years ago. We love the archival functionality and we utilize it a lot. We archive out to Azure Blob Storage to have an additional layer of protection and extend SLA times. From an information security and business continuity perspective, the solution’s ability to recover from a breach, is one of the biggest features of the product. We don't have to worry about the operational complexity of air-gapped backups and can rely more on the immutability approach. It is a highly valued feature in this solution. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? We've been a customer for two years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The stability of the Rubrik solution has been extremely solid. In the 2 years we've owned the solution, we've had no downtime because of hardware or software failures. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The ability to just attach additional bricks to scale-out capacity is great! How are customer service and technical support? Rubrik's tech support is amazing, which is yet another differentiator with this solution. If you previously used a different solution, which one did you use and why did you switch? Before Rubrik we used IBM Tivoli; however, we could never get Tivoli successfully tied into VMware. Tivoli's snapshot technology was a continual failure, and even with the support of IBM, we could not get it working without it causing infrastructure issues to our VMs. This left us in a state where we had no confidence in the ability of the product to actually execute backups or restores. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was extremely straightforward. The install took place one afternoon and included an upgrade. Within three hours we had our VMware environment tied in, SLAs configured, and we were prepared for the initial round of backups that were going to take place over a weekend. By Sunday morning, we had our entire infrastructure protected by Rubrik. What about the implementation team? There were two people directly involved in the implementation, Rubrik's pre-sales engineer and one of my engineers. What was our ROI? We have 62 percent TCO savings. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Rubrik Go was not available when we initially acquired the solution; however, as we look to further investments in Rubrik, we plan on executing with their subscription model. Outside of extending into the SaaS platform with Office 365 and Cloud Native offerings, there have been no additional costs. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We looked at Veeam and Cohesity. With Veeam, it seemed like they were stitching solutions together to provide the single platform. Also for several reasons, we did not want to write our backups to the same storage array as our production system. These two factors quickly eliminated Veeam. Cohesity was positioning themselves not only as backup solution, but also as secondary storage offering. We quickly determined that Cohesity was not as intuitive or as simple in their backup approach, which eliminated them as one of the products we were considering. We felt it was the best strategic decision going forward to choose Rubrik since their engineers were solely focused on solving backup and their solution was the simplest and most intuitive to manage. What other advice do I have? The biggest lesson I've learned throughout our time using Rubrik is that the investment in simplicity, has proven to be extremely valuable. Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2019-10-29T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Takes the load off vSphere or any of our ESXi hosts and makes things just a dream to manage What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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 not 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. What is most valuable? 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 toge... Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2019-10-07T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Managing backups is much easier now; it's no longer a full-time role in our organization What is our primary use case? We use it to back up of all of our infrastructure and file servers. The environment we're protecting with Rubrik is 99 percent virtual. We back up file servers, databases — SQL. Most of them are virtual machines in vSphere. The deployment model is a hybrid where we have the solution on-prem, plus we back up to the cloud, on AWS. How has it helped my organization? The SLA-based policy automation has made my life a lot easier because, on the administration side, things are way easier to manage. They're not as convoluted as other systems. Once I add a virtual machine to one of the SLA policies, it does its own thing and, at the end of the day, it's backing up stuff correctly. There's very little day-to-day maintenance that I have to do as an administrator. In general, day-to-day, it's made the administration of backups way easier. We went from having management of the backup system as full-time role for somebody to now being a role where we just basically just look at the reports and make sure that everything is running correctly and smoothly. We don't have to constantly log in to the system and rerun jobs. Rubrik has made life so much easier and simpler in terms of backing up our file system and VMs. In addition, the solution's predictive search — searching just for specific files within one of the backup sets — works great. We're able to quickly and easily find files when need be. It has definitely improved on the time it takes to find and recover files. In our old system it took quite a bit of time, with indexing the files and trying to do a search. Now, the search is basically instantaneous. We use it not only to recover files, but even if there are any questions about where a specific file is located, or if somebody moved a file. We're able to do quick searches and see where the file was moved to. Rubrik has also tremendously reduced the time spent on recovery testing because it's way simpler. More people can actually do it. Before, we had one or two people dedicated to that, whereas now, it's so user-friendly that we can have multiple people do it. It has reduced our recovery testing time by a good 50 to 70 percent. Overall it has greatly reduced the time it takes to manage backups, again by 50 to 75 percent. In terms of reducing downtime, I haven't really had to deal with any major crises, but for restores, it has also improved that tremendously, by 50 percent at least. We're able to focus on different things, more than just backups and trying to restore and recover files. We're able to spend more time on other production or testing which come along within our environment. What is most valuable? The Live Mount is one of the most valuable features Rubrik has. It gives me an opportunity to run DR testing. For any patching or DR testing that I need to do, I'm able to run it as if it were my production system but, in reality, it's just a copy of my production system. The web interface is great. The GUI is pretty good. It's very user-friendly, easy to manage, easy to understand, even for somebody who is not familiar with the system. The archival functionality has been working great for us as well. We archive to the cloud with AWS and there have been no hiccups, no issues whatsoever. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I've been using Rubrik for almost two years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? So far, the stability has been great. No issues whatsoever. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The scalability has been great as well. We have actually scaled up already. We got a few new bricks and it's been extremely easy to implement and manage. How are customer service and technical support? I've used technical support a few times and they've always been great, very responsive, including on weekends. They have even been proactive and have automatically opened up a ticket when they see something fail. If you previously used a different solution, which one did you use and why did you switch? We were using Commvault and we switched because we needed to scale it. We decided to look at other solutions and Rubrik was a great change of pace. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was really straightforward. From start to finish, from unboxing the product to setting it up, took us about half-a-day, through to getting our first full backup completed. The deployment itself only took about two hours and then, within three to four hours, we already had the first full backup. Our original strategy was for testing purposes with a few file servers, but it has become a system that replaced our production system. What about the implementation team? We did it with the help of one of the systems engineers from Rubrik. Our experience with them was great. What was our ROI? We've seen ROI, not in terms of raw numbers, but in terms of what I said before. Productivity has gone up because we're able to spend less time on daily operations for backups. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We looked at a few other solutions briefly, but once we did a PoC with Rubrik we decided to go with it. We found it to be a good product and fit what we needed it to do. We had other solutions in-house that could have done backups, so we didn't really need to do a lot of PoCs or testing. It was a pretty straightforward decision for us. The advantage of Rubrik is the ease of use and the extensive feature set it has. But it's the lack of some features, because the product is so simple to use, that is a drawback. What other advice do I have? It's a great product. In terms of the biggest lesson I've learned from using, it's that the product can do a lot more than what it's designed to do in the web, but you need to know PowerShell a lot better. Do a quick PoC. They are great with PoCs and showing customers how well the features work. So I would suggest that people take advantage of that. We have about seven users of the system itself and they're all systems engineers. For deployment and maintenance of the solution we really just need one person, a systems engineer. Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2019-10-08T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Provides us with reliable backups and removes the onus of checking that backups run What is our primary use case? We use it as a backup for our memory store. It protects virtual and physical environments for us, all on-prem. The applications being protected include VMware VMs, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, SharePoint, our file services, and operating systems. How has it helped my organization? The backups are a lot more reliable. That's the core headline. It's taken the onus off making sure that backups run and making sure that we're protected. It gives us time to work on other things proactively. It's a very reliable solution. Our technical team has benefited from it in terms of both time and capacity. Rubrik has absolutely reduced the time we spend on recovery testing by about 75 percent. It has reduced the time we spend on managing backups by the same amount. The reduction in recovery time is even greater. It's in the Exchange and database stuff that we've really noticed the difference. It's so much easier for the guys in support to recover single files, so the reduction in recovery time is as much as 85 to 90 percent. And because we've been able to recover more expediently, it has reduced downtime. We don't have a lot of downtime, but we know that there's a safety blanket there if we need it. When it comes to overall productivity, the team isn't having to manage and check backups on a daily basis, so they're interfacing with our end-users or proactively checking other aspects of the infrastructure and making sure that they're running. That's what the positive effect is. Problems are being headed off before they start causing an impact. From the ITIL problem management perspective, that's fantastic. What is most valuable? The most valuable feature is the speedy restore. It helps in expediting RPOs and RTOs across our core applications. I would rate the solution's web interface at eight out of ten. It's just fantastic and intuitive. It's so easy to use. I've never done any formal training on Rubrik, but I was able to quickly come to grips with its capabilities. That's a fantastic thing, especially for somebody who is just looking to adopt it, because they don't have to worry about training for their wider support function. What needs improvement? We would like to be able to do granular restores directly from Exchange. Also, more granular management of VM backups would help. For how long have I used the solution? We've been using Rubrik for 18 months. We've got four Briks across two data centers. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The stability is fantastic. We rarely have to engage with Rubrik support. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The scalability is also fantastic. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? I have used many other solutions throughout the years. This one just seemed to be quite refreshing at the time. It seemed to be the most cost-effective with the best support options. We needed to protect our core applications and virtualized environment, which is what Rubrik did. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was very straightforward. It was a solution in the box. We didn't have to complete much configuration, other than having the right port open on our destination servers and deploying the various agents. It was very easy to configure the vCenter connections and start backing up our virtualized environment. The trickiest part was figuring out how crawler sits in there. We set up a standalone server for that and installed crawler there. I can recover an entire database and granular emails within 15 to 20 minutes, now that I've practiced. We're having another one put in and the implementation strategy will be to upgrade the current Brik, have the new Brik upgraded to that version as well, plug it in and it will configure itself, essentially. What about the implementation team? We did it with our team and Rubrik support. The Rubrik team have been fantastic for the lifecycle of the product. What was our ROI? We have seen return on investment in Rubrik. Which other solutions did I evaluate? Veeam was also a front-runner in there, but there are a lot of horror stories about Veeam and Exchange backups. That affected the decision. Other differences between Veeam and Rubrik include the level of reliability and support as well as third-party support available from the vendor. What other advice do I have? Depending on the size of your environment, I would say go for it. This is a very flexible and reliable product, but I don't know how it would do in a large, enterprise-size infrastructure. I can't comment on that because I've never tested it. The SLA-based policy automation is just another name for protection group. It hasn't really changed the game. It's just a logical way of grouping the things that you protect and making sure they're all backed up in a similar way. It's good. I've tried some of the API from Rubrik, to automate the SQL resource, but it took a bit of a backseat. I've toyed with it a little bit, but not to the full extent of its capabilities. So far, the APIs seem fit for purpose. We have also looked into the Polaris SaaS-based framework for extracting metadata, from a risk perspective, but we haven't used it. There are just 40 of us in IT and about 30 of us have got access to it. I don't think many of them interface with it on a daily basis. The only regular user is probably just one of the infrastructure guys. We use it as a backbone for protecting the data of 900-plus law firm employees. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this product at eleven. It is really good. We are a happy customer. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2019-12-01T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Database backups to a point in time, and the way it archives off-of-box are key features for us What is our primary use case? We use it for backup and recovery; system protection is an even a better way to describe the use case. We not only have a backup of our data but it also provides disaster recovery. While having your data is important, having the ability to return to production, within minutes of an issue — which means standing up the whole VM at a point in time — is way more important in today's world than it is to just have a copy of your data. It's protecting both physical and virtual environments. It protects Windows, Linux — multiple flavors — as well as Microsoft SQL and Oracle Databases. We have two bricks and we're protecting about 175 machines, both physical and virtual. It has been about 98 percent VMs, and probably even higher than that. We're a VM shop. We are protecting all of our SQL databases with the native SQL tools within Rubrik, through which we can do all of our table restores at a point in time, depending on the database itself. We are using multiple different archives with multiple different SLAs, both on-premise and to AWS. Our deployment of the solution is primarily on-prem. How has it helped my organization? The SLA-based policy has had a positive effect on our data protection operations. I'm going to be going even deeper into the automation part, to use some of the newer features that have just come out in this release. It's going to be great to be able to just tag a machine in Virtual Center and its backups will be taken care of. That will help our process in terms of protecting machines that need to be protected and it will remove a step that people don't necessarily remember to do. In the 5.0 release, they added the ability to back up Oracle Databases, natively, similar to how SQL servers are done, and that's going to be a big win for us. Hopefully it will reduce our storage size because we back up many databases that have a lot of the same data in them. Today we can only do it as a big blob so we don't get any space savings in that respect. In terms of recovery time, it saves us days. The last time that we had a major system go belly-up, it was three or four days before we had the system back to being functional. In contrast, I was able to return a system that was being a pain due to some vendor-patching, multiple times, back to a known state, and within minutes. Granted, they weren't the same systems, but it would have been virtually the same thing if I had been able to do that with the major system that was down for days. Fortunately it doesn't happen that often, but in that particular patching case where I was using it, it felt like I did it about ten times. The vendor-patch was not going well, so I had to keep bringing it back multiple times, in a very short amount of time. But typically it has not been that much of an issue. In addition, with the multi-tenancy feature that they added, back in one of the later 4-trains, we've been able to provide another team within our organization access to be able to manage their own backups, and only see their servers. They are able to only touch and change stuff for their owns systems. In theory, that also gives them the ability to do their own restarts if they ever need to. Our previous system had really no way to handle that, so it's been pretty fantastic. Overall, I would say Rubrik has saved us a lot of time managing backups. I used to spend a minimum of about 50 percent of my time doing just nursing our backup system. Now, I might spend one percent of my time a week looking at the backups. There's not much that I need to do, other than just keep an eye on the system to make sure that nothing crazy has gone on. But I spend virtually no time, at this point, dealing with the backup system to make sure that it's still running. It's been a big help. Since I'm not spending as much time dealing with the backups or doing any sort of recovery, we have been able to actually work on other projects and other needs of the organization. It has also helped to reduce downtime. We had one production server that went down and we were able to get it back up in just a couple minutes. In comparison, if we had needed to rebuild that entire server, that would have taken days, and possibly longer, due to needing to reload the applications. That is not, sometimes, a trivial matter. What is most valuable? The database backups, where you can go to a point in time, are huge. The instant-on recovery is another huge bonus to the system. It lets you get a system back up and running within minutes if you need to, instead of having to try restoring it all out to your primary storage. That becomes a huge deal when you have a system that's down and people want it back up as soon as possible. The archiving, off-of-box, is awesome. It lets you put your data where you want it and gives you the peace of mind of having more than one copy of it. And it's smart about the way that it does the archiving. It doesn't just copy one-for-one. It does all of its processing of the deduplication and compression before it sends it off to the archive, which helps with our cloud costs. Before, we weren't doing anything to the public clouds. But the amount of storage that we're actually storing in AWS is a lot smaller than what it would have been if we had just done a normal copy-out. Rubrik's web interface is fantastic. I can get to it from pretty much any device. It's responsive, it's simple, it's clean, and it's easy to find stuff. One of our main goals when we picked the solution was that it would be something that was simple to use; that someone could do so without having to go to like a lot of training. In an emergency, if someone else needed to log in and figure out how to do something, they most likely could do it through the web interface. It's definitely user-friendly. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? We have been using it for just about two years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It's been very stable. We've not had any issues with the system. It has performed well since day one and we're on our fourth or fifth different code line. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Scalability is pretty simple. We had initially started off with our two bricks in a replication pair, and then we needed to bring that replicated pair into the main system. I worked with support, decomm'ed the replication target, got that brick reset, and then brought it into the cluster. That took just a couple hours, but that included the fact that I had to physically move the box. But it was extremely simple and, once it was in, it operated just as you would have expected. All of the certificates copied over and I was able to contact all of the nodes exactly how I would've expected. It was pretty seamless. Performance-wise, we might be using five or ten percent of the performance that's available through the system. After that initial ingest, you're only really copying changes, and most of our changes are relatively small in comparison to what the system can actually handle. In terms of features, we're only using five or ten percent of the features that are in the system. I was working on using some other features and then the need went away. It was taking a snapshot of a database and from one server and restoring it onto another server, but the need went away so I stopped working on that. As new things come out, they move us forward. They just released a feature for the archives and cleaning them up. I must've missed it in one of the release notes, so when I ran across it I said to myself, "Oh, I better go in and enable this." Low and behold, it did exactly what we needed it to do and it saved us double digits of terabytes on our archive locations, which was great because we were running out of space. When they added the ability to link VM's between virtual centers, I enabled that one. As new features are released I'll implement them. There are quite a number of features, such as all of the integration with NetApp and Pure Storage, which I can't use because I don't have that storage. I can only use the features that make sense for us. How are customer service and technical support? Tech support has been fantastic. They will bend over backward to help get solutions. The biggest thing that we use them for is to do the upgrades to the software. Since they have global support people, I'm not having to either patch a system in the middle of the day or having to change our backup windows. They have someone available after our backup window ends but before the beginning ... Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2019-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

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