Rubrik Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our environment is about 150 terabytes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use the Evergreen Subscription Purchasing Program.

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

I would rate Rubrik a nine out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Rubrik for four to five years.

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

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

I rate Rubrik a nine out of ten for scalability.

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

Overall, I rate Rubrik a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My clients are mostly medium and enterprise-sized businesses.

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

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

Positive

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

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

The deployment process takes a maximum of two weeks.

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

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

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

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

We use Rubrik for VM backups, NAS backups, and SQL backups. Most of what we protect is virtual. It's AHV and VMware, primarily. We have a half dozen physical machines, but most of it is virtualized. We don't do any cloud-native protection yet, although we're about to start doing Office 365.

We have the Brik as an on-prem piece and we offload all our data to Azure.

Not having to specify a time to run a backup with a fixed schedule is something that's really beneficial. In the past we had to schedule and try to manually stagger things over the window, to back up everything. Because Rubrik is SLA-based, you say, "Well, I need it to fit in this window here," and it just backs it up when it's most convenient for the Brik and for the third-party system. It looks at the CPU usage and says, "Okay, it's not as busy now. I know I've got time to take the backup." That's a real advantage.

When it comes to its archival functionality, automatic is probably the best way to do it. You set it up in the SLA to archive the data, and tell it where to put it, and it just does it. You don't have to worry about it. You don't have to check it. It just works. That's true with a lot of Rubrik's functionality. The big thing, the big benefit, it gives us is that it just works. We don't have to handhold it or check it to make sure things are still working. It does just work.

Another way it has improved our organization is recovery time. In the past, when we wanted to recover one of our SQL databases—our student record system is about 1.5 TB in size—to recover that from tape used to take about four or five days, and then get it onto a disk and have it visible in SQL Server. With Rubrik, when we've had to recover that, we've actually put it into the Live Mount capability. It runs on the Brik in the SSD layer. When we timed this, it took nine seconds to mount it so it was available in SQL Server and, within 30 seconds, it was out-performing production on queries. So within a minute you can have recovered what you might need to recover, rather than having to wait days to recover something. And if you have to completely replace the database, then you can migrate that over. Or if you have to just take some data out, you can just pull that out as well. It's an instant approach to database management, rather than having to worry about the time it takes to get data out.

And when we've had to recover a backup of SQL data, it has reduced downtime. It's allowed us to get back up and running within 10 or 15 minutes, rather than having to wait days to recover something, especially where the state needed to be adjusted as well. The impact, the downtime, is much reduced now.

When it comes to backup testing, we don't have to worry about validating that the backup has run. We can spin up a backup into Live Mount. We run our DBCC checks for SQL against the Live Mount instead of production. That helps protect the production platform performance, but it also allows us to validate that our backups are smooth and are recoverable as well. Having a backup is one thing, but proving that you can restore them has always been a bit tougher. So we pick databases on a weekly basis and recover those with Live Mounts to make sure that we can access the data in them.

We also don't spend time managing backups now. That's the really important message. We used to have about half an FTE looking after our backup state, making sure jobs were running, or actually changing their tapes on a daily basis. That's all gone away now. If anything, it might be 0.1 FTE, just to just keep an eye on things occasionally. Some weeks there might be two days of stuff we might need to do, whether it's for upgrade prep and then doing an upgrade, or adding some new bits to the backup piece, or removing things as we decommission them. But it's more operational now, rather than actually managing the backup piece itself. It's just another part of the process. Part of the business case for us was the time it was going to save us in managing the backup, to add more value back into the organization.

Rubrik has given us that half an FTE back. We don't have to worry now about what the backups are doing. We can actually now focus on other things. As a result, our IT security posture has improved because we've realigned that resource to improve our IT security resource count. We're now being more proactive with our security stances. We are able to use our resources more efficiently.

The Polaris, SaaS-based framework for extracting metadata is what the ransomware product actually is surfacing. You have the core Polaris product which is the GPS, and then Radar is actually in that. We do have Sonar as well, which is the data classification product search, to look for data that shouldn't be in certain places. The benefit of Polaris is that I don't have to be onsite to look at that. I can log in remotely. It allows me to have visibility of what we're doing in terms of our backups. That's particularly true if we have a ransomware alert that is triggered in the early hours. When I wake up I can have a look at that alert through the Polaris interface, rather than having to log in to my laptop and onto the VPN to get into the CDM product. Polaris is really helpful in giving us the agility.

The Sonar piece really helps because it allows us to look for data that shouldn't be in certain places, and it even helps the efficiency of platforms. For example, when our HR product creates the payroll, it actually creates a copy of that temporarily on the HR platform. When it's processed, it should be deleted or moved into archive. But when we ran Sonar against the HR platform, we actually identified that a lot of the data hadn't been tidied up as part of that process. So if that server had been compromised by either internal or external access, it would have potentially allowed a lot of that sensitive data to be leaked out. It's helped them to change their processes to look after the data better.

It backs up everything to Azure, so we no longer have to worry about tapes. When we went into lockdown, as a response to COVID, we didn't have to think about, "Well, we need to send people into the site to change backup tapes." That all carried on working. We could do a lot more remotely than we would have been able to do otherwise.

We also have the Radar product for ransomware detection. That looks for anomalies in our backups and will trigger an alert if it sees something that is an abnormal amount of change. That could be lots of deletes or modifications, compared to normal. Or it could be some VMs that have suddenly had a lot of folders added or deleted. We haven't had anything so far, at least, that was problematic, but it's nice to know that it's keeping an eye on how much change is happening with backups and helping us identify problems. It can detect when someone has gone in and deleted a substantial amount of data on a VM. If that's abnormal it will flag it and say, "Well, you might want to investigate this." 

Our finance was doing a big refresh of non-production data. They deleted a load of log data and the app flagged it and said, "Well, this is strange activity. You might want to just check this out." I referred that to the finance team and they said, "Yeah, we're just refreshing the VMs, that's okay." That was cool, because we moved on. But if they had said, "Well, no one has touched that for months," then we would have looked at it in a bit more detail to see what it could have been. But without that alert, we wouldn't have any clue that anything happened. It's helping us keep an eye on what's normal and not on the estate. It's worth it because it doesn't always have to be external actors that are causing problems. You could have somebody internal being malicious if they're looking to leave or dissatisfied in their role, for example. It helps keep an eye on those situations as well.

Its web interface is really easy to use. It's just click and go. It's fast and intuitive. We've never had any problems in navigating.

Looking at how the data is broken down, we can see the total story, but sometimes it's difficult to see how big a particular snapshot is. Across 90 days of snapshots, which one is a particularly large one? Looking at the data holistically could be a lot easier. 

With the Radar product, it would be helpful if it gave us a bit more insight into the alerts. It might be alerting on an object like this VM, but what particularly on that? A bit more oversight, without having to do digging, is the biggest gap they should be filling now.

I've been using Rubrik for nearly three years now.

It hasn't gone down yet. Even when we've had a power problem, and the Brik actually lost power because our UPS is failing, we turned it back on and it just picked up where it left off and carried on. It does just work and it's intelligent enough to rebalance itself as well.

Because it's hyper-converged, we can just add additional Briks and nodes to give extra capability. We introduced an edge appliance to our setup. We installed it, added it to the cluster, and it picked up some of the workloads. It was so simple, a bit like Nutanix. The fact that it is all hyper-converged means the whole scaling piece is so much simpler compared to 3D architecture. It's just plug and go.

It's only within our IT department that there is access to the product. There are about a dozen people who can use it. But the services that we support help support the whole organization, whether it's HR, finance, or research data, or user file stores. It does touch everyone.

Prior to using Rubrik we used NetBackup onto tape, and we used a bit of StorSimple as well. It used to take us six days and 23 hours to back up on those, as a full. We only had just just enough time in a week to fit it all in and then we had a very small window to change the tapes and start it off again. That was an ongoing problem we'd always had so it needed very close monitoring. If backup jobs failed it was always hard to work out why. And we had the whole tape-changing piece as well. In addition, StorSimple was quite expensive. 

Rubrik reduced our backup costs and our backup time. It increased our snapshot position as well, because we're doing incremental forever. It just made the whole process so much more efficient.

The initial setup was really straightforward. From unboxed to being in production it took less than two hours. That was with some of the networking we had to do around it as well. 

But we did go a bit too fast in terms of deployment. Even though it's incremental forever, it has to do that first full backup. We pointed a little bit too much at it the first time around and it struggled to ingest it all and move forward. After 24 hours, we stopped and started again because we were still backing up through the old method as well. When we started again we slowed the pace down to happen over three or four days rather than one day. At that point we had ingested everything and, from there, it's been smooth sailing. We haven't had any problems. 

The biggest thing I always say, if anyone asks, "What would you do differently?" is to slow down the initial rollout to make sure that you're not overloading the first full backups. The incremental forever won't be in position as quickly, but it will be a bit more stable.

I was the only one involved in the deployment. My platform team handles maintenance of it. I've got a junior infrastructure engineer who essentially looks after it. Her role is to look after monitoring and backups. But it's not something we ever really have to look at these days.

Our ROI is actually neutral because we're backing up more. We could never back up everything we needed to back up, and that was always a risk that we carried. While the return is neutral, we are doing a lot more than we could before.

We looked at Veeam, but I didn't want to have a large on-premise implementation, as that is very much an appliance model. I would have had to roll out quite a lot of infrastructure to cover that.

We looked at Druva, to see where that was in the market but that didn't really fit our model.

We looked at Cohesity as well, and they seemed to be a few months behind Rubrik, and just duplicating everything Rubrik were doing.

The main requirement we did have was that it had to post to AHV as well. Three years ago, there were not many products out there that could backup VMware and AHV.

We haven't explored the API yet. It's been on our list for quite a while, but it's always been hard to prioritize. We have so much technical debt that we've been dealing with, rather than focusing there. As an API-first product, it makes a lot of sense to go that way. For us, it's just a matter of prioritizing that. I have had a little play with the API interface, to prove we can get some information we want to get out of it.

We use it for backup and recovery; system protection is an even a better way to describe the use case. We not only have a backup of our data but it also provides disaster recovery. While having your data is important, having the ability to return to production, within minutes of an issue — which means standing up the whole VM at a point in time — is way more important in today's world than it is to just have a copy of your data.

It's protecting both physical and virtual environments. It protects Windows, Linux — multiple flavors — as well as Microsoft SQL and Oracle Databases. We have two bricks and we're protecting about 175 machines, both physical and virtual. It has been about 98 percent VMs, and probably even higher than that. We're a VM shop. 

We are protecting all of our SQL databases with the native SQL tools within Rubrik, through which we can do all of our table restores at a point in time, depending on the database itself. We are using multiple different archives with multiple different SLAs, both on-premise and to AWS.

Our deployment of the solution is primarily on-prem.

The SLA-based policy has had a positive effect on our data protection operations. I'm going to be going even deeper into the automation part, to use some of the newer features that have just come out in this release. It's going to be great to be able to just tag a machine in Virtual Center and its backups will be taken care of. That will help our process in terms of protecting machines that need to be protected and it will remove a step that people don't necessarily remember to do.

In the 5.0 release, they added the ability to back up Oracle Databases, natively, similar to how SQL servers are done, and that's going to be a big win for us. Hopefully it will reduce our storage size because we back up many databases that have a lot of the same data in them. Today we can only do it as a big blob so we don't get any space savings in that respect.

In terms of recovery time, it saves us days. The last time that we had a major system go belly-up, it was three or four days before we had the system back to being functional. In contrast, I was able to return a system that was being a pain due to some vendor-patching, multiple times, back to a known state, and within minutes. Granted, they weren't the same systems, but it would have been virtually the same thing if I had been able to do that with the major system that was down for days. Fortunately it doesn't happen that often, but in that particular patching case where I was using it, it felt like I did it about ten times. The vendor-patch was not going well, so I had to keep bringing it back multiple times, in a very short amount of time. But typically it has not been that much of an issue.

In addition, with the multi-tenancy feature that they added, back in one of the later 4-trains, we've been able to provide another team within our organization access to be able to manage their own backups, and only see their servers. They are able to only touch and change stuff for their owns systems. In theory, that also gives them the ability to do their own restarts if they ever need to. Our previous system had really no way to handle that, so it's been pretty fantastic.

Overall, I would say Rubrik has saved us a lot of time managing backups. I used to spend a minimum of about 50 percent of my time doing just nursing our backup system. Now, I might spend one percent of my time a week looking at the backups. There's not much that I need to do, other than just keep an eye on the system to make sure that nothing crazy has gone on. But I spend virtually no time, at this point, dealing with the backup system to make sure that it's still running. It's been a big help. Since I'm not spending as much time dealing with the backups or doing any sort of recovery, we have been able to actually work on other projects and other needs of the organization.

It has also helped to reduce downtime. We had one production server that went down and we were able to get it back up in just a couple minutes. In comparison, if we had needed to rebuild that entire server, that would have taken days, and possibly longer, due to needing to reload the applications. That is not, sometimes, a trivial matter.

The database backups, where you can go to a point in time, are huge.

The instant-on recovery is another huge bonus to the system. It lets you get a system back up and running within minutes if you need to, instead of having to try restoring it all out to your primary storage. That becomes a huge deal when you have a system that's down and people want it back up as soon as possible.

The archiving, off-of-box, is awesome. It lets you put your data where you want it and gives you the peace of mind of having more than one copy of it. And it's smart about the way that it does the archiving. It doesn't just copy one-for-one. It does all of its processing of the deduplication and compression before it sends it off to the archive, which helps with our cloud costs. Before, we weren't doing anything to the public clouds. But the amount of storage that we're actually storing in AWS is a lot smaller than what it would have been if we had just done a normal copy-out.

Rubrik's web interface is fantastic. I can get to it from pretty much any device. It's responsive, it's simple, it's clean, and it's easy to find stuff. One of our main goals when we picked the solution was that it would be something that was simple to use; that someone could do so without having to go to like a lot of training. In an emergency, if someone else needed to log in and figure out how to do something, they most likely could do it through the web interface. It's definitely user-friendly.

There are some improvements that could be made to the web portal itself to make life easier. It comes down to the usability, to being able to use the system wherever you are. While it's pretty user-friendly, there are little quirks to it that could easily be changed. 

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

It's been very stable. We've not had any issues with the system. It has performed well since day one and we're on our fourth or fifth different code line.

Scalability is pretty simple. We had initially started off with our two bricks in a replication pair, and then we needed to bring that replicated pair into the main system. I worked with support, decomm'ed the replication target, got that brick reset, and then brought it into the cluster. That took just a couple hours, but that included the fact that I had to physically move the box. But it was extremely simple and, once it was in, it operated just as you would have expected. All of the certificates copied over and I was able to contact all of the nodes exactly how I would've expected. It was pretty seamless.

Performance-wise, we might be using five or ten percent of the performance that's available through the system. After that initial ingest, you're only really copying changes, and most of our changes are relatively small in comparison to what the system can actually handle. 

In terms of features, we're only using five or ten percent of the features that are in the system. I was working on using some other features and then the need went away. It was taking a snapshot of a database and from one server and restoring it onto another server, but the need went away so I stopped working on that.

As new things come out, they move us forward. They just released a feature for the archives and cleaning them up. I must've missed it in one of the release notes, so when I ran across it I said to myself, "Oh, I better go in and enable this." Low and behold, it did exactly what we needed it to do and it saved us double digits of terabytes on our archive locations, which was great because we were running out of space. When they added the ability to link VM's between virtual centers, I enabled that one. As new features are released I'll implement them. There are quite a number of features, such as all of the integration with NetApp and Pure Storage, which I can't use because I don't have that storage. I can only use the features that make sense for us.

Tech support has been fantastic. They will bend over backward to help get solutions. The biggest thing that we use them for is to do the upgrades to the software. Since they have global support people, I'm not having to either patch a system in the middle of the day or having to change our backup windows. They have someone available after our backup window ends but before the beginning of our business day. It's not in the middle of the night for them either, they're coming in at their normal time. It's been great. Plus, on the human side, they're not forcing people to work a third shift to support us on the other side of the world. They give someone a normal shift and make the support experience positive.

We had been using ARCserve for about 18 years before we switched. Sometimes it's referred to as CA ARCserve and sometimes just ARCserve. It went through a couple of different incarnations. It got spun off at one point, so it's a hit or miss as to what it's known as.

We decided to switch because our system was way out of date, and in terms of performance, our backups were taking so long that we couldn't actually complete them. The restore time was abysmal. It took days to restore if we needed a large chunk of data. The maintenance of it, in terms of the human capital, was intense. As I said, I was using at least 50 percent of my time per week just trying to make sure that the backups completed, as much as they could, for that week. We were starting to run into the scale issue, where we couldn't back up our data and export it off to tape within any amount of time that was reasonable. 

We were also way out of space. One of the biggest management issues was that I had to keep moving stuff around. I had to arrange things such that, "That job has got to go over here because there's enough room for it. And this job has to go over here because there's enough room for that one." We did a project and we came across Rubrik and it was the best decision that we've made.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was the easiest setup that we had on all of the systems that we had looked at before we bought them. When we moved from our PoC to production, we actually handled the setup of the second brick when it came in. We didn't even need to engage their field engineers to help us.

There were two of us involved, me and a colleague who is the senior network engineer. The deployment took about four hours. We actually redeployed both of them, the whole system, within four hours. We tore up the old PoC stuff, refreshed it all, and then started over with it because some stuff had changed and we needed to restart it. We did the whole system within about four hours.

In terms of implementation strategy, we cut over from our old system as fast as we could. We started with our large and most important system. We let that sit there and bake and perform its initial backup. Once that was done, we started porting every machine over that we could. It was great with the way that the system worked. We just went through our list of systems that we needed to move. He started at the top and I started at the bottom and we just checked them off, made sure that we got them all in. We then stopped all of the legacy jobs on the previous system and we were up and running on the new system within less than a week.

The biggest ROI is a lot of hidden costs. With the lower amount of management time, I've been able to focus on doing a whole lot of other work. Nobody has done a full ROI comparison, but just in my time savings it's been huge. I've not needed to do a whole lot of work on the Rubrik system itself.

We pay yearly and it's based on the number of bricks. Each brick has a set cost, which I don't know off the top of my head. I don't handle the money side of things.

We have not had any other cost from them since we did the initial purchase. The only other thing that I know you can even buy are some of the connectors to the cloud: cloud-on and cloud-out. But we're currently not using them.

Our project started off with eight vendors. We whittled it down and PoC'ed four of them and ultimately chose Rubrik.

The ones we focused on were a Veeam/ExaGrid combo, and Cohesity was another one. We also looked at the newer product from ARCserve, their UDP product.

• The main difference was simplicity. Rubrik was heads-and-shoulders above the rest of them in terms of ease of use. 
• There was also the installation of the system and the infrastructure to run the system. Rubrik was head-and-shoulders above the other three. 
• Performance-wise, in terms of raw numbers, Rubrik was not the highest performant one, but that's also due to the way they value the systems in production. They don't try to stun the workloads while they're trying to back them up. You can work with support and change that, but that really only comes into play on your first ingest. After that, they were as performant as some of the other ones and way better than some of them.
• The last thing was that what they said they did — the features they had and what they said would happen — actually did happen. 

When we were evaluating the agent, or as Rubrik calls it, the backup service, theirs actually worked. One of their competitors' agents did not work and we were told that it was our fault that it didn't work, and for it to work we would have had to rebuild all of our Linux systems to meet their recommendations or specifications. That was a huge negative on their side, but a very big positive on the Rubrik side.

Look at what your SQL database is. If you're doing the industry standard of dump and sweep, migrate off of that as fast as you can. Get to the point where you're doing the native Rubrik backup for your databases as fast as possible. The industry-standard way can kill how much you can store on your systems, very quickly. That, in and of itself, is one of the biggest things that we learned the hard way. We thought we had a lot of time to move off and it bit us pretty hard for a period of time.

Another big lesson I've learned from using the solution is that you should use the system the way it wants to be used. There's a big mind change that you have to go through, to understand the way that the system works, depending on what you are coming from. We thought we had a good grasp of what we were actually backing up. But it turned out that there was a lot of hidden data growth that we were not expecting. That was mainly due to the fact that we had no good way of getting that information out of our previous system. If I knew everything I knew today, back when we were purchasing it, I would have bought more. But that comes with the territory of 20/20 hindsight. And having bad data, there's only so much that you can do.

Rubrik's Polaris, the SaaS-based framework for extracting metadata, sounds very interesting. We've not gone down that route at this point, but it's something that we'll be taking a look at within the next year or so.

In terms of maintenance of the system, it's pretty much just me. I'm the only one who really maintains it and, as I said, I might spend about one percent of my week dealing with the backups. It's very low maintenance.

Rubrik is a ten out of ten for sure, hands-down. They've been great. It's been one of the best engagements with a company that I've ever had.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So far, so good.

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

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

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

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

I did everything by myself.

It is hard to tell so far.

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

Veeam was considered, but dismissed.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.  

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.

I've been using Rubrik for three years. 

Native Rubrik is stable, but we have struggled a lot with stability in our recently installed cloud-based instance 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.

The technical support in India is excellent; they are quick to respond and resolve issues.

Positive

I previously used Commvault and EMC NetWorker. We switched because Rubrik is more affordable and user-friendly.

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. 

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. 

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.

We evaluated Veeam and are considering looking at it again, as the virtualization is better, and Rubrik has some issues with Azure.

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.