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SQL Server and MongoDB DBA at KVK
Real User
Jan 17, 2024
A very scalable and high-performing backup restore solution that can be used to perform long-term archival
Pros and Cons
  • "Rubrik is a very scalable and high-performing backup restore solution."
  • "Rubrik's disaster recovery capabilities could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

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

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Rubrik for four to five years.

Buyer's Guide
Rubrik
June 2026
Learn what your peers think about Rubrik. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2026.
903,118 professionals have used our research since 2012.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Sr Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Aug 1, 2022
Allows us to back up virtual machines and databases and provides more ease of management and fewer issues on an ongoing basis
Pros and Cons
  • "The web-based approach is the most valuable feature."
  • "I would rate this solution 10 out of 10."
  • "There could be better reporting and better filtering."

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
Disclosure: 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.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Rubrik
June 2026
Learn what your peers think about Rubrik. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2026.
903,118 professionals have used our research since 2012.
GopalSetia - PeerSpot reviewer
Pre Sales Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 5
Jul 10, 2023
A single solution where most things are integrated and used for backup and recovery
Pros and Cons
  • "I haven't encountered any bugs or glitches using the solution."
  • "Pricing is something that needs to be considered for improvement."

What is our primary use case?

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

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

My clients are mostly medium and enterprise-sized businesses.

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

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

What other advice do I have?

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

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Integrator
PeerSpot user
reviewer1755114 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jan 18, 2022
Summarized reports are helpful, and it is able to do 95% to 98% of the things that we want to do
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "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."

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
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Senior system Engineer at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital
Real User
Dec 12, 2021
Allows us to restore a VM in minutes and has the best ransomware detection and support
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "Replacing these four with Rubrik has definitely saved us a lot of money."
  • "There is room for improvement in pricing. After the licensing, the price tends to go up as time goes by."

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
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1497402 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Cloud Systems Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Sep 13, 2021
Saves us time managing backups and improves our team's overall productivity
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "I think Rubrik is a very good backup solution; it works well, is pretty reliable, stable, and easy to use, and I don't see any negatives in Rubrik, only positives."
  • "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 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
Disclosure: 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.
PeerSpot user
it_user1549755 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Storage Administrator at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
May 6, 2021
There's a lot of day-to-day time savings that allows us to get freed up to do other things
Pros and Cons
  • "When it comes to saving time managing our backups, Rubrik has saved us a lot of time compared to what we were using. It feels like it has saved us lifetimes of time because the process used to be difficult. It's not just the day to time savings. When something goes wrong, that's where the real time savings comes into play. We are able to get back to where we need to be more confidently and with much fewer steps."
  • "If there was something that we could get Rubrik to fix, it would be when our DBS takes snapshots of a server or the database, the replication doesn't kick off fast enough. They can't remote it to the peer site and manipulate it back up in order to move it over, take a copy of production, slap it over, and test it out. As I understand, they are working on it. Replication works. We also get spoiled by how good things are now. We get to a point where it is so easy but when something isn't instant gratification, it seems that everything else is so amazing, why isn't this right?"
  • "If there was something that we could get Rubrik to fix, it would be when our DBS takes snapshots of a server or the database, the replication doesn't kick off fast enough."

What is our primary use case?

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

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is most valuable?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What needs improvement?

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

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

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using Rubrik for five years. 

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is not an issue. 

How are customer service and technical support?

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

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

How was the initial setup?

The installation was pretty simple.

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

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

What other advice do I have?

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

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

I would rate Rubrik a ten out of ten. 

Disclosure: 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.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Cloud Services Manager at Tecala Group
MSP
Mar 18, 2021
Easy to use with minimal training required, innovative, good support
Pros and Cons
  • "The ease of use and innovation are the features that stand out for us."
  • "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."
  • "The Office 365 protection could be improved."

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?

Prior to selecting Rubrik, we looked at Cohesity, and we looked at maintaining our investment in our current platforms, which were Veeam and Avamar. We also had a brief look at Commvault, but the cost of ownership appeared too high.

Cohesity and Rubrik were the two front runners, given the next-generation platforms that we are developing. At the time we selected, there was no local support in Australia for Cohesity, which was one of the key reasons why we went with Rubrik. Rubrik did have local support and we felt that not having it would be a major problem.

Being a relatively new company, we also had concerns about whether Cohesity would be in business in two or three years. We had initially looked at Rubrik five years ago, and at that time we did not select them. It was not from a capability standpoint, but rather from financial viability. We wanted to make sure that Rubrik were financially viable before we selected them as a partner. After a two-year gap, we ended up implementing Rubrik.

What other advice do I have?

The lesson that we learned from using Rubrik is that it is really good to have a vision of what we want and actually see it come to pass. We have the support of Rubrik to develop a product that we're really happy to use and we're happy to present and sell to our customers. Having Rubrik in the Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders and visionaries quadrant in the past twelve months has proven out our product selection for data protection.

My advice for anybody who is considering Rubrik is to test drive it or get a temporary environment set up. You won't regret it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: 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. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
reviewer1491999 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Feb 21, 2021
Cut our backup management time significantly, and near-instant recovery reduces our downtime
Pros and Cons
  • "We do like the instant recovery... 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."
  • "With this new product, Rubrik, we walked into it blind, not being backup admins, and it made a lot of sense to us."
  • "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."
  • "The interface is still slightly clunky and has room for improvement."

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 same time, that we needed to do it in groups. That does take time. We were putting in something like 16 or 20 nodes, and we had to do it four-at-a-time. We had already done the physical installation and all the cabling, and all that portion. But when we started to add in the nodes, we had to do four and then wait for it to finish on that, and then do another four and wait for it to finish on that.

I think that, with time, they may implement a system that cues them up and continues to add nodes as it can. But that seems to be a similar problem to what occurs with other products in the same category. We also have Cohesity in our environment, which we don't use as a backup product, we use it strictly as a NAS, and it suffers from that same issue.

Our Rubrik setup took a few days, between our getting network issues figured out on our side, getting all of the cable management figured out with our data center team, the physical installs, the configuration with the Rubrik partners, and then adding in those nodes four-at-a-time until we had them all in.

We could have done it with less staff but we did want to make sure that all of us were aware of how the implementation worked, so we brought in all five of our team, two Rubrik partners, and two of our reseller partners, as well.

For maintenance of Rubrik we require two to three people. One works on Rubrik pretty much all the time, and the other four of us just jump in as needed on little things here and there.

In terms of Rubrik users, in addition to the five of us who do administration, we've given out access to a few of our database groups, so far, where there are 10 to 15 people.

What about the implementation team?

Our reseller was ASG at that time, now it's Sirius. Everything was fine with them. On the Rubrik side, we had an engineer and a sales engineer, and that worked really well.

What was our ROI?

With Rubrik, we have been able to allocate FTEs to the other areas. We could have eliminated them but we chose to reallocate them. As we've had people either retire or move on to something different, we've either not replaced some, or we've been able to replace some of them with lower-level staff, simply because of the ease of use of this product.

On the hospital side, the ROI is from the lower cost, less work to manage it, and the smaller footprint in the data center, which means less power and cooling.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing and licensing of Rubrik is better than products that we've had in the past. It was quite a bit cheaper than Commvault and NetBackup.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We actually reached out with our VAR and we evaluated anybody that could use the HCP that we have for archive storage. There weren't too many on the market that could do that. Rubrik was really the only solid option that we had at the time, other than Commvault and NetBackup. We weren't too happy with the latter two because of how much they were costing at that time.

What other advice do I have?

We did physical PoCs in our environment and we did have Cohesity and Rubrik side-by-side, as well as NetBackup and Commvault. We did PoCs for moving to public cloud as well, for some of these services. The PoC with Rubrik stood out. 

Make sure that you work with your support team that's going to support you after your purchase and make sure that you're able to work with them well, before you pull the trigger on it. We like to build partnerships. When we have those partnerships, we're able to really rely on them for a long time.

I am a fairly new entry into the backup field. Before, we had Commvault and NetBackup, and when they were showing us how to use those, and trying to teach us some of the terms in the backup world, it felt like backup was a very niche piece of IT, and that there was a lingo and a language behind it. It seemed that there were definite things that people had experienced before that were common among all backup products, and things that they were left wanting or hating. With this new product, Rubrik, we walked into it blind, not being backup admins, and it made a lot of sense to us. And when we did bring in a backup admin, they said it was quite different to anything that they had worked on previously, and that it made more sense and that it was just quite a bit easier to manage.

Rubrik is something that everybody can understand fairly easily, and when we have given others access to it, such as the database teams, and we've let them run with it and see what they can do, they've been able to implement it really well. They've been able to figure out how to implement the tool in exactly the way that they wanted, whereas before there may have been limitations.

We haven't used the ransomware recovery at this point. We've got some protection behind that, where they are locked down and require additional effort to delete and to change. We follow guidelines from our IT security team and Rubrik together. We just haven't seen a scenario yet where we've actually needed to use that.

We have used Rubrik's predictive search, although we don't use it too much right now. Mainly, the way that we've used it so far has been the traditional backup and restore, where we get tickets stating that a backup needs to be spun up and it's done automatically. Then, when somebody comes back later on and says, "Hey, we need this item restored," we're able to call them up and restore it with them on the phone, within a matter of minutes. We haven't really had to use the file search too much or a lot of the tools that they have available for us, just because the need hasn't been there yet.

When it comes to recovery, we usually spin it up and turn it over to the team that asked us to recover that data. The information and identity access management team had to spin one up recently. They said that they had a bad patch and wanted us to spin back to that morning. We did that, and it had lost some of the network settings and some of that stuff that they were used to getting. We spent about 15 to 30 minutes with them and everything was back exactly the way that it should be. But that was pretty much exactly the same with other products that we had so it wasn't something new for us.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: 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.
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reviewer1497909 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technology Architect at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Feb 21, 2021
We don't need to manage maintenance or backup windows anymore
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "You need to understand what you're getting for the price: you are getting a backup solution which is state of the art and works absolutely flawlessly, with the storage needed to store your backups and all the sexy features that a modern backup solution can provide you, like deduplication, erasure coding, compression, fast execution time, secured data, and top-notch customer support, so while it might be expensive on paper, when you analyze what you are getting and the time you can spend on other stuff, then Rubrik is very cost-efficient."
  • "There is always room for improvement with some shortcuts for the web interface. They could make it even more beautiful."

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: 

  1. You buy an extra brick, expanding the cluster, but it has a cost. 
  2. 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. Previously, when somebody was requesting to restore a file, everybody was trying to escape that task. Now, it is the opposite. Everybody wants to do it, because it is so simple.

We don't need to manage our backups anymore. We just need to configure them, and from time to time, check if everything is okay. If something is wrong, then we will get an email from Rubrik anyway. It is almost a product that you can configure once, then forget it. The time that I am spending on Rubrik daily is less than half an hour. This time allocation is for anything that is data protection-related.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

You need to understand what you're getting for the price. You are getting a backup solution, which is state of the art and works absolutely flawlessly. You are getting the storage needed to store your backups. You have all the sexy features that a modern backup solution can provide you, like deduplication, erasure coding, compression, fast execution time, secured data, and top-notch customer support. So, it might be expensive on paper. It's not free, but when you analyze what you are getting and the time you can spend on other stuff, then Rubrik is very cost-efficient.

We started to use Rubrik Go about a year ago. It is a bit of pity that we discovered that only two years ago, because Rubrik Go is the best solution for us because we are an OpEx company. This means that we are using leasing a lot. All our previous appliances have been leased with a third-party. If we knew that Rubric Go existed, we probably would have used it a long time ago because you are dealing with only one vendor, which is Rubrik. This brings two very important advantages:

  1. As soon as there is a hardware refresh, you can benefit from that hardware refresh at no cost. It's already included. So, if I know that in a couple of months, there will be a new hardware released by Rubrik. What will happen next, they will provide us with the new hardware and send an engineer to migrate all the data from the old version. Then, they will take the old version back with them. This is great. I don't know another vendor who does this.
  2. We have access to the Polaris framework because it is included. We have started to use Polaris because of the Rubrik Go initiative.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at the next version of Veeam. Back then, it was not satisfying. We identified three issues: 

  1. Veeam is only a software. With Veeam, you still need to find storage in the company to deploy the tool and store the backups. This is not the case with Rubrik, which is a turnkey solution. You have everything: the storage, compute, and software. 
  2. Veeam was still using the old way of managing backup jobs, meaning that you need to say, "Okay, at that time, I need to start that job. At that time, I need to start that other job, etc." It was very complicated. Since then, Veeam also moved to an SLA-based policy. So, they actually copied Rubrik. 
  3. The lack of Nutanix AHV support, though Veeam now supports this.

I'm still convinced that Rubrik was the best choice for the company because it is so easy and efficient.

What other advice do I have?

The best thing to do at first is to start a PoC. Usually, you can get the physical hardware onsite for a month, then you can play around with it and be involved with the product from day one because you will see it works. You will enjoy it a lot and won't want to give the PoC hardware back to Rubrik because it's so impressive. That is what happened to us. We kept the hardware for two months. I was actually negotiating with Rubrik to keep it longer. I was battling internally to convince the management to get the first brick, knowing we have 15 bricks all over the world. If you start and test it, then you will love it.

We are not using Polaris Radar to get more insights about ransomware.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10) because perfection doesn't exist.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: 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.
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Buyer's Guide
Download our free Rubrik Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: June 2026
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Rubrik Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.