Rubrik Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have been using this solution for about three or four years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our environment is about 150 terabytes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use the Evergreen Subscription Purchasing Program.

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

I would rate Rubrik a nine out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using Rubrik for five years. 

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

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

Scalability is not an issue. 

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

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

The installation was pretty simple.

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

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

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

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

I would rate Rubrik a ten out of ten. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have been working with Rubrik for three years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our ROI against the other products was within the first six to twelve months.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We've been using Rubrik for about a year and a half to two years now.

The stability has been good. We don't run into a ton of issues on it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have been using it for about four years.

We have been a customer for the last four years without any hardware failure. That is one aspect of its reliability. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

I deployed it myself. It is too easy to involve a third-party, which would be a waste of time and money.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is our main backup system. All of our VMs, our hardware hosts; everything is backed up using Rubrik.

Disaster recovery is one of the options we have explored, so that in case of a big disaster we could utilize their image conversion to run our VMs on AWS, but that is just a proof of concept at this stage. We have tested it. It works. But we don't have a proper plan in place for that.

We have only one physical server that we are protecting with it and the rest are all virtual servers. We have around 400 server VMs and all of them are protected using Rubrik. Most of our environment, around 90 percent, is VMware, while 10 percent of our environment is Hyper-V. 

With the VMs we are also taking backups of our CIFS shares. We have our file clusters running Windows Servers so we are taking backups using the SMB mount. We have NFS clusters as well, for the Linux side, which we're backing up using the built-in NFS connectors. We explored SQL backups, but right now we are using our SQL Server to dump the data and then the files are being backed up. We're not directly backing up SQL using Rubrik.

The SLA-based policy automation has had a very good effect on our data protection operations. We came from Commvault and we used to have tape backups. It was a full-time job for one of our sys admins to update the tape library, replace the tape cartridges, recycle them, scratch them, and then bring them back. It was a huge process. We were using offsite storage to store our tape backups which were continuously going back and forth from our campus. Now it's all automated. We barely have to manage anything. We are now consumers instead of actually setting this up. It was one set up and we just maintain it now.

It saves us time when it comes to managing backups because we barely do anything, other than just verify. We get a daily report to see if any of the VMs are out of our SLA. The only action item we have, if something is out of SLA, is to verify what happened, why the backup failed or missed its window. Given that it was tape before, it has gone from hours to minutes. It used to be more proactive, where we were continuously checking everything and replacing the tapes and making sure that everything went through. Now, it's more of a reactive situation, where we only look at a backup when there is an issue.

It has also definitely reduced the time we spend on recovery testing, because it can do Live Mounts and that does not require an actual recovery. So our VMs are instantly available. And the file restore feature allows us to explore the file system of every VM, instead of restoring it, and then just restore the files that we need, and that has been amazing so far as well. Within a few minutes, we have either the VM or the files available. I don't even know how to compare it to Commvault and the tape backups. When I joined Harvard, they already were on Rubrik and we were decommissioning Commvault, so I know a little bit about the process. We do classroom recordings in Harvard Law School and those were still going to Commvault. That was the last project that I was involved in and I saw the crazy amount of work involved where we had to bring all the tape libraries from safe.

And when it comes to recovery time itself, it's an instant recovery in most circumstances, even if we have to recover something that's more than three days old. In our environment, after something is more than three days old it goes to an archival location on S3. When we restore data that is between three and 42 days old it is downloaded from S3 and then made available. For us, that situation is a little bit slower compared to the Live Mount. Depending on the size of the VM, it could range between a few minutes to a few hours. But if the data is on premises, it downloads the data instantly.

We don't have to worry about the solution too much, which definitely has helped our productivity. Most of our workflow is automated, where VMs are automatically added. The SLA is automatically assigned. Things are automatically archived. Anyone can take action. We have on-call people who look at the reports and take action as needed.

There is a live-restore feature, their Live Mount, and the way it works we can instantly recover a VM, a past backup, to be directly attached to our VMware environment. Rubrik will act as a disk for it. It's like an instant restore. Within a few minutes our VM is up and running. And then, if we want to restore it, we can just migrate it to our actual storage.

Rubrik's web interface is very simple to use. We have a very simple SLA configured so that everything is backed up every day. Any new VMs we configure in our environment automatically get added, the SLA is automatically assigned to them. All the VMs, after three days, are archived to AWS S3, and then there's a life cycle on the AWS side to work with that.

The archival functionality is one of the main features because the Rubrik that we have has about 60 or 70 TB of total local storage, which is definitely not enough for our data. We have around 140 TB of data stored on AWS and, without the archival feature, we would have to buy at least three times the number of nodes that we currently have to keep all the data secure for 42 days, based on our SLA. It's definitely saving us on costs. It also gets us away from having to keep redundancy on the data, because if we were storing it on-premises we would have to make sure that we have redundancy and offsite storage. Now, all of that is AWS. We no longer have to worry about that.

Capacity reports could definitely be improved. It's hard to determine what is using the space and why. For instance, you can see that some host is using 2 TB on the Rubrik node and the disk space on that host is 400 GBs. It's hard to explain how there can be 2 TBs of data on local storage when nothing has changed on the host for the past three days. 

They have improved a lot on the SLA reports. We used to get a lot of false alerts before, because a snapshot was missed. In the reports it would remain a "non-compliant to an SLA for 42 days, until the 42 cycles were done. They've removed that. If it misses an SLA and if you take another snapshot or to take an automatic backup, it automatically fixes the SLA report to show us it's protected.

Most of their documentation for cloud stuff can be improved. This could be old information, as we did the PoC last year and maybe their documentation has been updated now, but we literally had to contact support every day, and at every step for things like, "Okay, what do we do with the AMIs? How do we get Rubrik configured? How do we convert the image?" None of that was available in a single documentation format. It was spread around in different documentation.

I've been using Rubrik for the past three years, since I joined Harvard, but I think it was deployed on-premises four or five years back.

It's very stable. We have had an instance where one of the nodes was offline for no reason, but working with their support it was determined that there was a cache issue and they fixed it.

We don't have to worry about backups. We have been using it for more than four years and so far there hasn't been a single incident where we have had any issues recovering any of the files or VMs. It is very robust, continuously updating.

They have everything available by API, which is a good thing because this is the way that things are going forward with an API-first infrastructure. In terms of their physical nodes you can also scale them, but there's a requirement of always increasing in sets of three more nodes. We have one Brik and four nodes currently, and to increase our storage we would have to buy three more nodes, which is kind of a limitation. It would have been nice if we could just buy one node and increase that way, gradually, instead of buying three large nodes. But I can't complain about it. That's probably their infrastructure.

We are using it for everything except our media storage. Our classroom recordings are directly archived to glacier and everything else goes through Rubrik. The reason for that is that we don't want on-premises storage of the media. These are large video recordings and it would be very expensive to store them locally. Rubrik keeps a local copy for three days, for regular backups. We are actually testing a new feature where you can connect to NAS storage and there will be no local data, only metadata, stored locally. Everything else is archived. We have tested this feature with their support. They showed it to us but we haven't acquired the license to start using it yet.

Only sys admins have access to Rubrik in our organization. Currently, 10 of our sys admins have access to the system. 

Rubrik support is amazing. When we are involved in upgrades we always open a ticket and there is a tech person joined through a tunnel and looking at the upgrade while it's being done. It's like everything is off our shoulders in terms of managing it. If something goes wrong, they're always available to support us.

Every time we've opened a ticket with them, even to explore new features, we have always gotten an instant response, and even when it comes to trial licenses. The whole proof of concept project we did on AWS for DR was provided from their support, and it has been amazing. The experience has been really good.

Most of the time, their turnaround time for tickets is less than 24 hours, especially with high-priority tickets. Recently, we have had some issues with our VM storage sizes not reflected properly. We were looking at a capacity report and we were seeing some of the VMs using way more storage on Rubrik than they should. This has been a difficult problem and they have continued to escalate it to different engineers. That is the longest interaction we have had and the issue is still pending.

We are not running the bleeding edge, so there is a possibility that if we do switch to 5.2 we might see an improvement already on that deduplication; that might be the reason that this is happening. They are looking into it. They have suggested a couple of actions from our end to actually delete those backups, archive them, and restart the backups, but they're still looking into it.

We wanted to get away from tapes. We tried Veeam but it did not work very well for us. There were a couple of shortcomings which we couldn't maintain, plus it wasn't cloud-ready at that moment, at least not to the extent that Rubrik was.

Rubrik was very fresh in the market at that time, but it was bringing features that we were looking for. We were already set on using either Azure or AWS and it had the needed support for them.

I've been involved with upgrades but not an install because we just have the one on-premise device. I've been involved in multiple proofs of concepts. For example, they launched a couple of features along the way where we were testing cloud workloads and converting our images to native AWS images so that we could use it as a disaster recovery site in the future, if needed. All of our backups are going to AWS.

Upgrades are very straightforward. Their support is always with us, so we haven't had any hiccups during the upgrades. They go very smoothly. I've been involved in multiple upgrades, and we were at some point running the bleeding edge software, when we were looking for some features that were available, without any issues. So we did upgrade to the latest and greatest version. Our general policy is to stay one version behind to iron out all the bugs. But with Rubrik we have attempted to run the latest version, to use the features, and it has been stable enough for us and the upgrades have gone smoothly.

We usually block out a two-hour maintenance window for upgrades. There have been major upgrades which required some database work, and they have taken more time. In the move from version 4 to version 5 their whole database infrastructure was changed.

We got grandfathered in the licensing terms. Their licensing is much more narrow now and you have to buy licenses for every cloud feature, but we got most of those things as a package.

We got really good pricing because we're in the education sector and we were one of the first big organizations to start using Rubrik.

Recently, when we were looking for direct backup to glacier, we started using CloudBerry which is a very basic product. It's a standalone install on our media servers and it's directly backing up to glacier. It's a single unit license on the single server; there's no hardware involved with it.

The only advantage of CloudBerry is that we're not keeping an on-premises copy. When we take a backup with Rubrik it creates an on-premises copy of all of our media files and then uploads them, and that requires more storage on Briks that we don't want to spend money on. The Rubrik feature we tested, where you connect to NAS storage, wasn't available when we acquired the license from CloudBerry.

Rubrik is an amazing product. There are some features still missing. For example, you cannot do a granular backup or restore of Active Directory. That has been on my wish list. I have posted that on their tech forum where people discuss new features and new things that they are launching. I know that it will come because they have been adding other granular backup support with VSS. The AD-level granular backup, so we can restore a single account or a single computer, is the one of the last features that we are requesting. They usually do bring out whatever features we request in their next update.

We have not used the solution's ransomware recovery. I have attended a couple of seminars where they have recently been talking about that, but we haven't tested it. We haven't had any incidents which would require us to use that feature.

We have also not used its pre-built integrations or API support for integrations with other solutions. We played with a couple of features, such as the organization features to segregate some of our VMs, but we found that it was not possible the way we handle the system. We wanted to make our domain controller backups inaccessible to our backup administrators, because we wanted that to be part of the DCA job. So we explored the organizations, but the way it works we would have had to move everything into an organization and our backup administrators were taking care of everything except domain controllers. So we dropped the idea of using organizations.

In terms of downtime, I don't think Rubrik has reduced that in a meaningful way. We have a pretty redundant environment anyway. If something happens to our VMware hosts, the VMs automatically fail over to other hosts so there is rarely any downtime. We have been off physical servers for quite some time. If there were physical servers, Rubrik could help reduce downtime, but since we don't have physical servers we don't even know what the recovery would look like with Rubrik. With tapes it was crazy when something happened. If someone did not look at RAID and we had a two-drive failure or a three-drive failure, then it would be a full recovery from tape. But now, because everything is running on VMs, we have no downtime, most of the time.

Overall the product is really good. Rubrik is very competitive. Even if you now look at their positioning on the industry review sites, they are doing really well. It's a very good product. We recommended the product to our Central IT department. We are Harvard Law School, but Harvard has a Central IT which manages other schools, and they are doing a PoC right now. It's a good product to recommend.

We are a financial company and we have redundant data centers, with a VMware Metro Cluster staged between the two locations. We have Rubrik running in our data center and it is used for backing up our on-premises infrastructure.

We keep the backup of the environment on-premises for two weeks, just to be able to restore in case we lose or corrupt part of the virtual infrastructure. We also send copies of some of the data into the cloud for long-term archiving because we're under a regulatory requirement to store certain parts of the business data for up to seven years.

At this point, our environment is probably close to 90% virtual. We use physical servers for market data and essentially, there is nothing to back up on those systems because there's no data that's worth saving there. Should one of these servers fail, we just put a new one in place. It would be deployed, including the operating system, and it would start processing market data for us. We consider these as compute nodes and there is no persistent data on them.

We are highly virtualized, so Rubrik is used to back most of the VMs up. We are running VMware ESXi for our VMs, and application-wise, we are a Microsoft shop so we backup SQL Server, Exchange Server, and Microsoft file shares. We also back up a lot of business data, which is contained outside of that server.

The biggest impact that Rubrik has is that it allows us to have the reliance on the backup, knowing that the data is there and that the ability to restore is there. It provided the safety net we needed to deploy faster. This is because it played a great role in convincing developers and operations to do rapid releases, as opposed to doing it the old way where we didn't have reliable backups. It meant that we had to wrap all the releases in the solid recovery plan in addition to just the rollout. Now, we have the confidence in the backup and can release faster.

Rubrik has saved us time with managing backups in general. For recovery testing, the SLA policies have greatly reduced the time that we have to babysit backups. This is simply because Rubrik put thought into designing their system the right way. Instead of adding a server by creating jobs and creating schedules on top of the jobs, you're just dropping them into an SLA and all of the legwork is done for you, so adding the systems is easier.

The fact that they're SLAs, I don't need to go through the job log and analyze it to figure out why there was a job failure. Similarly, I don't need to look into the impact of the failure. This is because I know that if the machine is protected within SLA guidelines, I will get an alert in case of a problem with a machine. In this case, it means that I need to act and somebody needs to take a look at it. Essentially, it has reduced a lot of repetitive babysitting steps that don't really produce any business value.

We have never had a problem such that Rubrik has saved us downtime. But, it's certainly a great thing to have this additional safety net, which is a reliable backup solution. Everything we have is redundant, so even there is a hardware failure, another piece of hardware kicks in. We won't rely on Rubrik specifically for disaster recovery, but we do rely on it for business continuity. If for whatever reason, both of our data centers lose power or lose internet, or are inaccessible, then Rubrik will help us rebuild the environment. What we don't rely on it for is daily disaster recovery.

As we moved away from our previous solutions, using Rubrik has improved our overall efficiency. These days, we rarely have to do anything with the systems. Most of the time when we have to resolve an issue with the backup it's because the target system has become unavailable or has been taken offline for maintenance. It may also be the case that we have another restore request. These are the only two reasons that a restore might be delayed. It is not the same as we had with NetBackup, where we had to update the agent and software. We don't have to do anything of that nature. Backup is now pretty much gone from our weekly schedule.

The most valuable features are reliability and programmability. We have a great success rate for backups with Rubrik and because of the ease of automating tasks, we also run periodical restores to check the quality of the backups.

Rubrik makes it really simple to automate the restore task, which is important because I don't care about the backup. I care about the restores, and Rubrik did a great job of assuring restore reliability.

Our time spent on recovery testing has improved simply because we're able to automate it. It saves us between two and four hours per week, whether it is simply adding a new machine or going through the logs and seeing what failed.

We don't do recovery on a daily or weekly basis. We receive between two and four recovery requests per month. Because it is mostly manual stuff, it is comparable to the old system if we're talking about restoring something within a two-week timeframe when it's still on disk. However, if we're talking about restoring from the cloud versus restore from tape, the timeframes are not even on the same level. This is simply because we use the offsite storage for tapes, so sometimes the restore task from tape will take weeks.

The web interface is easy to navigate and pleasant to look at.

The SLA-based policy has simplified our data protection operations tremendously. It goes back to caring about restores instead of backups, and the fact that it allows me to easily drop systems into the SLAs greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to set up the system for backup.

It allows me to create a protection policy and while it's running, I know that the systems that I've assigned to that policy are being protected accordingly. If that is not happening then I get an alert or a notification telling me that the systems are outside of the protection horizon. It's a great approach.

The archival functionality is impressive. Just by eliminating reliance on the tape technology, it's greatly improved the rate of successful restores that we were able to perform. In two and a half years, I can't remember a case where we couldn't locate data that was backed up using Rubrik.

We have not needed to use the ransomware recovery function but I know that Rubrik backups are essentially immutable. Even if an intrusion does happen, we'll be able to restore the data quickly.

I have used the rapid restore functionality and I noticed that on many occasions, I was able to mount a virtual machine or database on the Rubrik cluster itself. So, I know its high-speed connectivity options are excellent and support VMware well.

With the previous version, we had to do some Python scripting because the API was better and more developed than the PowerShell support. However, with the new version, it seems that PowerShell covers all of the functionality that we need, which is great, especially because we are a Windows shop.

The restore success rate is very good. I don't care so much about improving the time spent on the resource. Rather, it's the success rate. At this point, we have a 100% success rate, which was definitely not the case with any prior system that I've used.

I would love to be able to just get from the dashboard to a file that I need, or a system that I need. I believe that right now, there's the ability to search by system name, and then it will take you to the system. It would be great if I can reduce the number of clicks that I need to take in order to do a restore, or maybe to a system and the file, or maybe just directly to the file. It would be like continuous integration with PowerShell.

As we go into the Cloud in addition to Polaris, I would love to see a future where I can back up pieces of the Cloud, perhaps ARM templates or Azure Active Directories from the Cloud to on-prem. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but just as the Cloud becomes more popular and used on a daily basis, I would love to have just a single pane of glass to provide visibility into the backups.

I have been using Rubrik for approximately three and a half years.

In addition to just great recovery rates, we haven't had any unforeseen outages with Rubrik itself, due to hardware failure or anything like that. Even the Rubrik software upgrades are non-disruptive in the sense that because they're multiple nodes in the chassis as the upgrade happens, Rubrik never actually goes down and can continue doing the backups on the nodes that are not directly affected by the upgrade.

This is a well-designed product, so adding more space is as easy as adding another chassis. It is great functionality because adding more storage is like adding more bandwidth and more connectivity. That's a great design.

We are a fairly small organization, so probably five to six people have access, and there are probably three or four who use it. We centralize Rubrik to our IT systems and IT help desk, so it's all managed internally. There is enough flexibility to extend it to developers and give certain people rights to certain restores. It's just that the workload is so light that it doesn't make sense for us to constantly keep training users on how to operate it. By the time they need to perform a restore, they'll forget it all and have to come back to the help desk anyway.

If in the next version of Rubrik they announce new ways to back up Azure or Office 365, I would jump on the offer. The main driver for us to purchase additional Rubrik units would be if we were constrained on storage. As of right now, we have sized it correctly so we have plenty of storage to satisfy the SLAs for the data that they need to store in-house.

If our data consumption or data storage requirements increase, and we suddenly need more storage for data protection, we will look into adding units. At this point, we are properly sized for the performance.

Our experience with technical support has been great. We had a couple of questions in the beginning, so we interacted about two and a half years ago. You would email them and would get somebody from there, without having to exchange many emails.

They will do the upgrades for you, so lately, probably over the past year, the only interaction we have had with support is when we needed to do an upgrade. It's a great experience where you just open up a support ticket with them, they open up the secure remote channel, and they come in to complete the upgrade.

Prior to Rubrik, we used Veritas NetBackup for the backup and CommVault for the tape system. We switched to Rubrik because our success rate was poor. The restore rate was horrendous, especially when we had to go to the tape system. it was hovering around a 75% success rate.

The initial setup is extremely straightforward. We went through the exercises and were provided configuration details that were required from us. I think that they were as simple as supplying IP configuration information. Then, once they assembled all of the racks and wires, the Rubrik technician showed up, configured the system, and it was all done in probably less than 20 hours in total.

Because we're virtual, it meant that our implementation strategy was simple. Essentially, once the Rubrik system had been configured, all we had to do was to point it to VMware vSphere vCenter servers and from there, it automatically picked up all of the virtual machines that we had. Then, it was just a question of assigning them to SLAs and removing them from the old backup system. That final piece is not included in the 20 hours because 20 hours was just to get the Rubrik running. But, it was extremely easy to integrate.

We worked directly with Rubrik to help with the deployment.

For maintenance, you really don't need more than two persons, and that's for redundancy purposes. You can have a single person manage terabytes of backups.

By now, we have probably made the money back in reduced support costs. Beyond that, we don't value this type of product by how much money it produces. Simply, the compliance requirements come with steep fines and other repercussions if they are not adhered to. Because this product gives us assurance in our ability to restore data if needed, it satisfies our compliance requirements.

You get what you pay for. Rubrik was probably the most expensive solution but in the long run, it's justified by the value of the data that it protects. We were able to make a case that it's a good investment.

They have a very straightforward pricing model.

We evaluated a couple of other solutions, but Rubrik offered the best appliance. We looked at products from Veeam and the present solutions from Veritas and others, but it looked like Rubrik was the most modern solution.

I am familiar with the predictive search but we're not employing it. Usually, when we need to restore, we have to restore the whole machine or we know the location of the file or data that was deleted.

We've considered using the Polaris SaaS-based framework as we're looking into leveraging the cloud a little bit more. Polaris is definitely on our radar, but we're not using it in our day-to-day operations.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.