Rubrik Reviews

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. 

This project initially started out as a replacement for our legacy backup system, IBM Tivoli, which was backing up our VMware environment. Since our environment is almost entirely virtualized, protecting those assets was the primary goal. We also knew that we wanted to get to a state where our backups were protected against ransomware via immutability or air gapped backups, which we've now accomplished with Rubrik.

Shortly after the initial deployment, we realized the full capabilities of Rubrik. We are utilizing Rubrik's backup integration with Oracle databases and SQL databases. There are several other business critical applications, like Tableau, that are also being protected via  Rubrik.

Due to Rubrik's ability to execute in protecting our on-premises assets in the data center, we decided to utilize Rubrik's Office 365 and AWS Cloud Native solution to protect our data in the cloud.

The SLA-based policy automation has streamlined our data protection operations. We have moved away from backup windows and moved to letting the SLA policy actually determine when is the most efficient time to do backups. We apply the SLA based on business rules to certain artifacts or entities within our environment and let Rubrik run with it. It has been extremely efficient and has cut down on the operational overhead of managing backups.

In addition, we have absolutely seen a reduction in the time we spend on recovery testing. We have automated the validation of backups for our tier-one assets using Rubrik's API.

We're seeing about a 62 percent TCO savings and 90 percent management time savings since switching to this solution. And we've reduced the data center footprint, which comes with operational overhead, by 75 percent since switching from Tivoli.

Since acquiring Rubrik's Polaris GPS offering, we have further increased our productivity by utilizing SLA policies that extend across clouds and multiple on-premises data centers.

It's hard to specify a feature that is most valuable. The overall architecture is where we find the most value. Having an API-centric approach has allowed us to utilize a lot of automation to trigger the capabilities of Rubrik. This helps us minimize the operational overhead of managing and restoring backups. We have integrated Rubrik with our ticketing system and have some custom triggers to present Dev/Test environments from Rubrik to our development team.

The web interface is extremely intuitive and, with recent changes to the API, it has become more responsive than it was when we initially implemented the product two years ago.

We love the archival functionality and we utilize it a lot. We archive out to Azure Blob Storage to have an additional layer of protection and extend SLA times.

From an information security and business continuity perspective, the solution’s ability to recover from a breach, is one of the biggest features of the product. We don't have to worry about the operational complexity of air-gapped backups and can rely more on the immutability approach. It is a highly valued feature in this solution.

At the time of this review, Rubrik is still missing several components to their Office 365 backup offering. These ideas have been voiced to Rubrik and their product management team.

It's been our experience that when our ideas are surfaced to Rubrik, we are brought into a feedback session with Rubrik's product team. We now view Rubrik as a partner in our business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.

We've been a customer for 4 years.

The stability of the Rubrik solution has been extremely solid. In the 2 years we've owned the solution, we've had no downtime because of hardware or software failures.

The ability to just attach additional bricks to scale-out capacity is great!

Rubrik's tech support is amazing, which is yet another differentiator with this solution.

Before Rubrik we used IBM Tivoli; however, we could never get Tivoli successfully tied into VMware. Tivoli's snapshot technology was a continual failure, and even with the support of IBM, we could not get it working without it causing infrastructure issues to our VMs. This left us in a state where we had no confidence in the ability of the product to actually execute backups or restores.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward. The install took place one afternoon and included an upgrade. Within three hours we had our VMware environment tied in, SLAs configured, and we were prepared for the initial round of backups that were going to take place over a weekend. By Sunday morning, we had our entire infrastructure protected by Rubrik.

There were two people directly involved in the implementation, Rubrik's pre-sales engineer and one of my engineers.

We have 62 percent TCO savings.

Rubrik Go was not available when we initially acquired the solution; however, as we look to further investments in Rubrik, we plan on executing with their subscription model.

Outside of extending into the SaaS platform with Office 365 and Cloud Native offerings, there have been no additional costs.

We looked at Veeam and Cohesity. 

With Veeam, it seemed like they were stitching solutions together to provide the single platform. Also for several reasons, we did not want to write our backups to the same storage array as our production system. These two factors quickly eliminated Veeam.

Cohesity was positioning themselves not only as backup solution, but also as secondary storage offering. We quickly determined that Cohesity was not as intuitive or as simple in their backup approach, which eliminated them as one of the products we were considering.

We felt it was the best strategic decision going forward to choose Rubrik since their engineers were solely focused on solving backup and their solution was the simplest and most intuitive to manage.

The biggest lesson I've learned throughout our time using Rubrik is that the investment in simplicity, has proven to be extremely valuable.

The use case is for backups of virtual environments, so it covers all IT areas. Whether it's infrastructure, virtualization or database platforms, our organization uses it for backups and storage.

The solution is deployed on-premise. The version I'm running is 5.3.1.

The most valuable feature is the archive to cloud location and the automation around the PowerShell script. There are also reports and dashboards. There is simplicity in going through the interface and servers and setting SLAs. Overall, the product is good. It's just a single pane of glass.

Rubrik has ransomware and encryption, so there is nothing I can fault on the technology.

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

I have been using Rubrik for three years.

Rubrik has come a long way. Initially, it was a bit unstable in giving incorrect information, but I think that has been rectified. The performance of the devices was an issue. When you added devices, it was a problem. Rubrik actually leverages off your Microsoft VSS, so Rubrik is basically just a front-end.

It is scalable, but you're just locked in because you have to buy a Rubrik device unless you go with the cloud.

There's another team that does maintenance. There are other products, so the team isn't just dedicated to Rubrik. We have about five individuals using Rubrik.

We are planning to increase usage. There are between a few hundred workloads to a thousand in IT. We're basically looking at cloud technology, so we're not actually using Rubrik.

The technical support is excellent.

I played with various technologies. I played with Veeam, Data Domain, Commvault, and Tivoli.

We switched to Rubrik because of the user interface. The other products use the same VSS Microsoft. The only difference between all these backup products is just the user interface, the PowerShell modules, and the reporting that it presents. 

The underlying technology is all the same, whether it is Veeam, Data Domain, whatever it is. The only thing is the compression and the deduplication. 

The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment took a day or two.

We worked with Rubrik for deployment.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10. 

In terms of the compression, there are other products out there that are better in terms of deduplication and recovery time. Another thing is that you have to buy a Rubrik device if you don't go cloud. You can't go buy another piece of software, so you're actually locked in.

My advice is if you want to go through Rubrik, then you must forward something that can protect the data and the backups from ransomware for end-to-end protection.

We have been mainly using Rubrik's backup and recovery solution for our microservice-based products, which we have for different trading applications. We have a trading application, where the customer makes use of any workflow through the GUI of the trading application. The request goes through our microservices server REST API. These microservices server REST APIs are sometimes using DynamoDB as a database solution.

Our applications are quite scalable and user-friendly. We wanted our database solution to be highly scalable. Since all the trades being carried out between customers are highly secure in nature and carry sensitive data, we wanted this in case there was some type of application crash due to a timeout or downtime. Our database should not crash and the data should not be lost. For that purpose, we needed to use Rubrik's backup and recovery solution. So, on a weekly basis, we take regular snapshots of our databases via Rubrik's solution in case of any downtime, especially during the week from Monday to Friday when trading is being done at a high peak level. At that time, we take snapshots. In case there are any issues, then we will simply roll back our database to the previous snapshot which we had captured.

We are protecting VMs. They are all virtual.

It has reduced our maintenance efforts. The amount of time and effort that would have gone in troubleshooting various issues related to a data crash has been addressed by Rubrik. So, it has helped to improve our productivity. The data is being captured about our customers periodically that is secure and safe.

Our entire team uses the Grafana application to monitor the response time of various API that we have in the application. Because we can restore our application to its normal state, gradually the graph of the downtime comes down for APIs. For Grafana plotting, we are using different error codes. We see in graph form if there are any spikes in the error code, for how long those spikes remain, and how much time it took for the spikes to go down their normal level.

From a security point of view, data is highly-encrypted using the Rubrik security solution. Therefore, we don't have to worry about any image/data loss or data leakage.

If there is any corruption of the snapshot, e.g., the target is corrupted while taking the snapshot, Rubrik is our faster option to have two snapshots: snapshot one and snapshot two. If there is some issue with snapshot two, then we still have the option to restore the data to snapshot one. In this way, we never lose the customer's trade data.

Rubrik's web interface is very user friendly and easy to use with all its navigation, e.g., it is easy to identify if you're looking for any help. So, the help features are there. The customer support feature is very nice. We are regularly using that. The alignment of all the fields of the platforms on the Rubrik GUI are very good.

Its archival functionality is very nice. On a regular basis, we snapshot our VMs and server logs. So, we keep archiving the logs and snapshots into Rubrik for archival functionality on a monthly basis. For 30 days, we maintain the snapshots of our data using the Rubrik archival functionality. Whenever we need to retrieve any snapshots that have been stored for the past one month, we can easily retrieve them. The retrieval process is also very fast from the archival function, and it doesn't take too much time.

We have been using Rubrik for around three years.

In my experience of using Rubrik, once or twice it didn't work and the issue was resolved quickly. Otherwise, it is quite stable.

My colleague, my assistant, and I manage it.

It is highly scalable. We can easily add more VMs to our configurations or Rubrik account. It also can easily take snapshots.

In-house users are around 25 to 30 people who are mostly from the DevOps profile: software engineers, the infrastructure team and release managers. Developers are also involved.

We have received excellent customer support from Rubrik when addressing any of our queries, from time to time.

The technical support is very good. They are quite well-versed with the Rubrik solution, so they provide quick solutions to our queries.

We were not previously using another solution.

We learned third-party backup and recovery solutions can be good enough to handle and exhaust all our requirements. Instead of starting to build a backup recovery solution from scratch, we explored outside our organization. Now, third-party vendors are very good and intelligent data recovery solutions are available.

The initial setup was between an easy to medium difficulty level. To install the Rubrik application, we created an account, then specified the contribution of our VMs. The microservices took the most amount of time during the setup part. Later on, defining the duration and frequency at which we want the snapshots to be taken was easy. 

The setup took three to four days.

A colleague and I deployed it. Whatever we couldn't do, we directly contacted Rubrik for that.

Due to this effective, faster backup and recovery solution, we are now able to focus on other creative tasks to meet our entire pipeline. So, we have seen ROI in terms of the improvement of productivity in our team. We save around one million dollars a year.

The solution has saved us 25 to 35 percent of our time.

The maintenance has been very quick and fast to retrieve our snapshot from the archival functionality. If you had to source for any data research query, then that used to take around one hour for one terabyte of data. Now, that has been reduced to 20 to 25 minutes. It takes less time for us to restore data as well as reduces recovery time. 

The downtime has been reduced. Downtime used to be around five to six hours. Now, it has been reduced to three to four hours. This reduction happened after two or three weeks.

The licensing cost is quite high. That is something that needs to be worked out, because so many times it happens that the team does not have the budget or there are other issues at that time. Cost has become an important factor in deciding whether to continue with the Rubrik solution.

The maintenance cost is low.

We also initially evaluated Cisco, Dell EMC, and Nutanix and found the Rubrik solution to be the most effective for our requirements. Almost all these solutions were equal. With the other vendors, the main problem was the customer support when we initially gauged those vendors, e.g., to get hands-on training to get a demo, then later on to follow up with their teams, the entire process wasn't smooth. However, with Rubrik, we didn't see this problem.

We are considering migrating our microservice stack from a VM-based solution to Docker-based solution. So, we are considering a Docker integration with Rubrik for the communication of our microservices with ModAPI of our solution. For that, we probably need a handshaking mechanism. For that purpose, we are considering the Rubrik security REST APIs.

I would strongly recommend trying the Rubrik solution. Their solution is stable, scalable, and intelligent. It has cloud solutions for our backup and security needs.

We are not using the SLA-based policy automation feature of Rubrik. We might look at this in the future. Now, we have our own separate SLA-based automation tool.

We are using Polaris, but there is another team at my organization who handles governance and compliance.

They are in touch with our team to understand our entire integration, setup, architecture, how things have been done, and how Rubrik is helping us. The plan in the future is that certain teams will start using Rubrik in their application.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10). 

We are using Rubrik for our server backups.

The Live Mount feature is one of the main features we use. It is saving us time in restoring the VMs, allowing us to give them quickly to the developers for testing. There is a faster turnaround time.

The most valuable feature has been the Live Mount feature.

There are some features Rubrik planning to give in next version. For instance, a tool where we can integrate with our SAP HANA native tool directly from the HANA studio/HANA Cockpit, to trigger backup and restore. We understand it is available in the new version, looking forward to it.

I have been using Rubrik for approximately three years.

Rubrik is stable.

Rubrik is scalable. We can manage multiple Rubrik appliances from a single console.

All of our IT infrastructure team are using Rubrik. We are using it in at our data centers in  India, and we have another  in the middle east. We have recently increased our usage of the solution.

The technical support is good. We have good contact, all the issues are resolved on time.

Positive

We have previously used a backup tool only for virtual infrastructure, as we were migrating to SAP HANA from a virtual environment. We wanted to have a single solution for virtual and physical  environments , Rubrik is helping us in a great way here.

The initial setup was straightforward. However, since Rubrik was new to use and different than the previous our solution, there were some new things we need to understand, such as SLA based orchestrating. We were used to scheduling it manually before, Once SLA is done the automation in place.

The full implementation process took us two and a half weeks.

The implementation was directly from the OEM.

We have received a return on investment.

We pay annually for the license for Rubrik. There are no additional costs. Initially, we needed to set it up, negotiate and finalize the offer.

I would advise people who are wanting to implement this solution to evaluate their business case and the business requirement prior to making their decision because every enterprise has a different requirements and environments, they should do the thorough assessments, POC's  then decide on what backup fits their needs.

I rate Rubrik a nine out of ten

Our use cases are for backing up all critical databases on our SQL servers. It also backs up critical virtual machines in our VMware environment.

The most specific reason why Rubrik is a step above just about everyone else out there is that it's cutting edge. With Live Mount I can instantly spin up a server for backup in less than two minutes. It takes 10 minutes to backup and it also takes under a few minutes to recover. With Avamar, these would take an hour or more.

The ease of use is the most valuable feature. It is a very simple system compared to just about any other backup technology like Commvault or EMC Avamar. It is extremely easy to use and very versatile.

They have what's called an organization which means different groups of access to Rubrik, but the alerting only goes to the admins. My suggestion to Rubrik is to make sure that the separate organizations or groups of users get the appropriate alerting.

I have been using Rubrik for six months. 

The hardware is on-premises and also replicates to the cloud. It's a backup appliance but that appliance has software on it. We are also utilizing a software version at another data center where we're not going to install the hardware. And it also tiers to the cloud.

Rubrik seems rock-solid to me. We haven't had that many issues, we're able to backup and recover things a lot faster. We haven't had that many support tickets as opposed to other solutions.

It's very scalable. You're able to add additional controllers and also add storage on the file. It's also expanding their Polaris, which is their online software manageability portion. That, in their future release, will allow us to manage all of our Rubrik clients at all of our data centers which is excellent for scalability.

We have around 20 users. The majority of those are our database administrators. They are allowed access to database servers, so they can do their backups, manage backups, and recover backups. A handful of people in the U.S. and Canada are the backup administrators. The overall maintenance works on the machines to backup schedules and recovery.

For the maintenance, you can do it with as little as one person per site. We have five to 10 people for both Canada and U.S., which is five data centers.

My role is to design and implement this technology. Our systems administrators who manage the VMware environment would be the ones that would handle the day to day with the Rubrik backups and recovery.

We're in the process of replacing all the old backup technology with this. We're looking at roughly 300 virtual machines per data center. So we're looking at an environment that is probably 3000 virtual machines. The database count for all of those is probably in the hundreds. It's pretty significant. We have around a 65% adoption rate. 

Rubrik has the best vendor support that I've dealt with. They're probably the best. They're the most knowledgeable, they're the most respectful, they call a lot better, they will follow through to the end. Not like with VMware.

We used Commvault in Canada and in the U.S. we had Dell EMC Avamar.

We switched from them because of the cost of ownership. The complicity of Avamar, the fact that Avamar constantly had software and hardware errors that had to be dealt with support, and the fact that Dell EMC support is horrendous made us switch. They would not take ownership of an issue and work it through to the end. They'd give us a one-word answer. It was a nightmare.

There are not very many pros, as far as staying with the Avamar solution. It's old, it's outdated, it's slow, and it only half works. It's extremely expensive. It takes forever to restore. There isn't a pro to keeping the old solution.

I didn't use Commvault that much. That was our UK team or our Canada team. I couldn't give too many details. I know that it was an older solution as well, and I know that they were having issues with it.

Versus any other solution, Rubrik was a lot simpler to configure. The first system was up, on the network and configured and ready to backup in under 20 minutes, versus multiple days of configuration with another solution.

We used Rubrik and we also used one of our vendors for the deployment. Rubrik was very knowledgeable and knows what they're doing especially because it's pretty new to them. We had to bring on Rubrik resources, but Rubrik is an excellent company to support.

We have seen ROI. The cost is much cheaper. It's also because I was able to recover three machines in 15 minutes versus nine hours.

Anyone who's using Rubrik or any solution is to do a POC, or a proof of concept, that is key. If you can do a proof of concept and you can put the device on your environment and test it, it would justify any costs that Rubrik will be asking for that product.

I believe we looked at Cohesity. There's a couple of other EMC solutions. Their latest, IPDA, is their latest Avamar solution. It's an integrated Avamar. It also was not appealing. It was expensive. And it had the same complicity and the same slowness the old system had.

Cohesity wasn't an instant recovery, like Rubrik. That was the main issue. Live Mount is one thing that I think customers will find a blessing. It gives you the ability to just spin up a machine that's already been backed up instantly on your network. No one else can touch that.

My advice would be to work closely with their personnel to implement it. For a large organization like ourselves create an internal project with a project manager.

You can have different departments and teams work together on implementing the different systems from the old backup solution to the new backup solution because you will have to have different teams working in cohesion to change that over.

The biggest lesson I would say I've learned using Rubrik would go for any new technology. Make sure to do a proof of concept with another vendor at every device and build a test plan, a project on how you want to test that product and put it through all the different tests. Ask: how fast does it back up, fast does it recover, how easy is it to use, what is their support department like?

I would rate Rubrik an eight out of ten. Their product is getting better. There are still some things that they need to polish off. In comparison, I would give Avamar a two out of 10.

Rubrik is our primary backup solution for production and development systems. We also use it for testing purposes when we need to spin off a temporary non-production environment. The solution protects some of our VM's, SQL, and even physical appliances.

A definite improvement using Rubrik has had on our organization is that it cuts down the operational time spent in the backup world, equaling fewer support calls and less time spent on engineering the product. This is because everything essentially functions straight out of the box. SLA-based policy automation is easy to use and easy to customize. It has made day-to-day operations a lot simpler because of the simplicity in creating SLA procedures. It saves us time.

The Live Mount is one of the most valuable features since it allows us to spin up copies of our current systems in what is just basically a development state.

The Rubrik archival functionality is also a good feature that works well and is definitely useful.

The integrated reporting is not really that nicely built. The reporting functionality could definitely be a little bit more customizable from an administration perspective, with an easier to understand interface.

I have been using Rubrik for four years.

Rubrik is definitely a stable product.

I consider Rubrik scalable because all you need to do is add another Brik and it's seamless.

At this point we have adopted it 100 percent, so we do not have plans to increase its usage.

I have found Rubrik's technical support to be extremely knowledgeable and easily accessible.

Prior to using Rubrik we used Commvault. We switched solutions because of the features, the simplicity of the product, and its speed. 

I'm spending less time managing the solution. I would estimate that Rubrik recovery testing saves us 80% in time as compared to our prior solution.

Rubrik's support is definitely on the expensive side, but I consider it to be top of the line. We incur no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees.

Needless to say, we evaluated Commvault, as we were making use of it at the time. Other solutions we evaluated include Veeam and Dell. I think it was the ease of use, reliability, and scalability of Rubrik that influenced our decision.

The Rubrik web interface is really easy to use. Three or four people work on Rubrik in operational roles.

In addition, our use of Rubrik Polaris, which is a SaaS-based framework, is showing good savings in the time it takes us to manage backups.

In response to customer feedback, Rubrik has already implemented an improvement which enables you to restore Active Directory at a more granular level.

The primary use case for Rubrik is backup and restore and as an archival system. We use it for backup and restore for virtual machines, managed volumes that are mounted and which we use for snapshots from Rubrik to endpoint devices, NAS shares from our Isilon system, as well as SQL databases, Oracle Databases, and Windows and Linux. We may have some failover cluster Windows shares going to it. It's for backups and restores of pretty much everything. It works really well in concert with Pure Storage technology. We have a really large Pure Storage environment and they play really well together.

The solution is on-prem and it's protecting environments that are on-premises exclusively at this point, although we have plans to push towards the cloud. Most of it is virtual but I'd be surprised if we didn't have at least half-a-dozen physical machines connected to it. 

I don't think that we have had an instance where we needed to recover en masse, like from a ransomware attack, but we have disaster recovery in production, and as part of our strategy we back up things that are also in test. Because it's test, sometimes things get configured wrong, and that's the whole point of the test. You figure out what works for you and the company and what solves the problem. But you break things in the process sometimes. It's really great to be able to do all of your testing and all of your work in testing without a great fear of really losing data or losing progress very much. We've had phone calls where they say, "Hey, I need XYZ restored, or I need this entire drive restored, or I need this entire VM restored." At the click of a button, five seconds later, it's back. It took longer for them to tell me what they needed back than it did to get it returned.

We try to run a disaster recovery test at least once a year. We want to make sure things are working, especially since here in Louisiana we have hurricanes. There could be a storm that comes in and we have to migrate our data and everything. The great thing is, we've got our data in both our production data center and our DR center. We're frequently doing those tests, we're frequently replicating between our different data centers. We do get a report about the replication status. With the exception of that, I don't think we really do much restore testing. But when we have restored, it has always worked. I never restored things before we had Rubrik so it's hard to know whether it reduces the time spent on recovery testing.

I know from my previous scenario in higher education, if the user on the phone said, "I know exactly the file and directory I need restored and I know exactly the day that I need it restored from," then I could probably do it in under 20 minutes. With Rubrik, I can do that in about 35 seconds, if I am already logged in. And in my previous occupation, that 20 minutes was only if the file was actually backing up. Frequently, we encountered issues where the file wasn't even backing up. Sometimes there were issues that we didn't get an email about and, as a result, we weren't backing things up. We only found out things weren't getting backed up because somebody needed some data. Overall, it's a huge reduction in time, if we're going from 35 minutes down to a minute.

And if Rubrik doesn't back up, we know it. If there's some issue where a system goes down and it can't take a snapshot, we know it. And that's good. It's not that I want to get those emails, but those are the emails that make you confident in your system. It has detected a problem and it immediately lets me know about it. And it tells me, "This is exactly the problem." I know exactly what I'm looking for.

It's great whenever I get a call that says, "Hey, I need this restored," because it's like I get to be a superhero. The person on the other end thinks their stuff is gone. They know, "Oh yeah, we have backups. And they might work, unless something happened and we don't have them." Whenever you give them their file back, and it's the last version that they edited, and their work is safe, it's really awesome. That's our validation. I have a lot of confidence in the system.

Regarding my team's overall productivity, here's the thing that's really great about Rubrik. It's really great that I could have someone who doesn't do this for a living. Provided that permissions were set up right, I could have a normal user, who is in charge of just his own data, go in and participate in restore operations. Rubrik is that much of a seamless, easy-to-use system. That's not just productivity for my team, a team full of people who do this every day. Users know they don't even have to ask. They can log in, they can get to what they're looking for because it's very easy to find, and they can restore it. Even though I may be one of the primary people to configure and deal with the nuts and bolts of it, that doesn't mean I'm the only one who can actually restore and get files back.

There's also the aspect that, whenever they commit a change or do something, as long as we're within our SLA snapshot time, they know that their changes are secure and that their changes will be there. So if they need to walk back or change something, they know they'll be able to. Again, confidence and trust in the system is fantastic.

The restore and backup agent is really great. It takes the load off of vSphere or vCenter or any of our ESXi hosts. It makes things just a dream to manage.

The fact that the API is so available to us with the playground — there's an internal and public playground — is also valuable. We can write API calls — and although I'm sure there's a way we could hurt the data — we write those calls with a lot of certainty that we won't be destroying anything. We write these API calls using really easy mechanisms and generate automation a lot faster. We can integrate into other systems that might not be as easy with other solutions. We can integrate Rubrik into the systems very easily because they give us the tools to do so.

Also, the web interface is really great. The design, from a user-experience standpoint, is really straightforward and easy to use. Sometimes you go to websites and you can immediately tell, "This is going to be a pain to use." The buttons are in weird placements or when you click on something it doesn't load very quickly. I don't know if Rubrik got it right on the first try or if they went through a lot of user testing, or maybe they hired some people that did user experience in the past. But they nailed it. Usually, from the very first panel, the dashboard that you land on after login, you've got most of your functionality right around where you need it to be. You've got your new items on the left, you've got your support on the top right. Nothing really seems out of place or just stuck in someplace.

Generally, within three or four clicks, I can get anywhere I need to be, whether that's restoring a snapshot or creating a new host. It's really fast. And from a technical standpoint, you can get to the interface from any of the nodes within the Rubrik cluster. You don't just explicitly have to go to the cluster host's name at the top level. You can go to any of the nodes that make up the cluster. So let's just say networking is hard, systems sometimes are hard and things can break. That's just a thing that happens with computers, they're not perfect — I wouldn't have a job if things were perfect. Let's just say something happens where you don't have access to the cluster. You can go to any of the cluster resources, any of the nodes in the cluster, and you can access virtually the same interface.

That's awesome, because usually, in the past, if something was down and it affected the cluster endpoint, the primary website, you would have to SSH in, you would have to go into command line, and reboot the server. There's no need to do that here. You have to lose your entire environment for it to go down.

In terms of SLA-based policy automation, I don't know what they were doing before Rubrik. I have to imagine there was a similar SLA system. For me, personally, I had a very static, flat rate of four weeks and that was it. If I wanted to have a separate set of SLAs, a separate 15-day SLA or a separate 20-day SLA, I had to stand up a completely separate version of that system and point things to that. Instead of having multiple SLAs in the same system, I had multiple systems that were exactly one SLA, which is a big management headache. There's a lot of overhead to that. You have to have another machine to run it, you have another cluster to run it. I don't know if this is a normal thing in the industry or if it's just a thing that all of a sudden I've seen, but of course you would do it this way. Everyone should do it this way.

For me, it was a really big eye-opener, being able to say for each resource, "You're going to be a 15-day at this time. That's every snapshot that you're going to have." It's continuous protection. It's really awesome that I get to work with a product that does that and does it well. I saw videos when I was learning about Rubrik. Other places have these features too, but they might not work as well. Frequently they don't. That's really one of the big selling points of the system.

Rubrik's archival functionality is a no-brainer. It doesn't require a ton of thought. I don't have to over-engineer different policies to validate what I think it's doing. If it says it's doing it, it's doing it, and it's really easy to click a button and say, "Now it's done." It's a very convenient piece of tech and I absolutely love it.

Regarding API support for integration with other solutions, we have not used it directly with any of the other hardware except Pure Storage. Pure Storage and Rubrik really go together well. We use a batch management control, which is like a job-controller. It's a modern solution, but it doesn't feel like a modern solution. The developers of it went in a different way, so it accepts command line and PowerShell, but with Rubrik's PowerShell modules and their API at a raw level, we're able to integrate it into pretty much anything. We're able to control when and where snapshots fire off and how to lock the different volumes to write- and read-only, depending on what we want to do. We're able to control that with our seemingly legacy — it's not actually legacy — system, even though there's not a direct integration.

It's the same thing with Isilon. Via a script mentality, and in concert with Adam Fox over at Rubrik, we're able to work with him and push all of our Isilon endpoints, all of our network shares from Isilon, into Rubrik, without having to go through the GUI. In our case, we had quite a lot of Isilon hosted storage. We were able to push that to Rubrik relatively seamlessly and simply because they had an API out there for us to use.

We have a lot of DBAs who are interested in Rubrik because, whenever you're a database administrator, I can't imagine that you'd have a lot of fun. You're always worried about mitigating loss. You have your database, and your replication of your database, and your backups for your database, and additional backups for your database, and then you need validation on those backups. The great thing is that Rubrik does most of that. It's not replication for databases, but it backs up the database and it's very seamless. It's very fast.

There are different settings that you can have on those backups to get a varying range of SLAs, where it's up-to-the-minute, or day or hour. You can get that continuous data protection, which is really great.

I joke around, every time we meet our SE, and say they could use a dark theme for the user experience. Everything else has a dark theme now, so it'd be cool if it had a dark theme. 

But on the serious side, I have a personal want which might not necessarily make sense with Rubrik as a company or Rubrik as a software, but it would be really nice if they could also handle things like item-level backups and restores of Active Directory objects and DNS and DCP objects.

In Active Directory there's a recycling bin where something goes if you delete it. I don't know if it's there for a static amount of time, like 90 days, or if it's until we hold 1,000 objects, so if you delete more things, the oldest ones go from the recycling bin. It would be really nice to have an additional layer of convenience, where if it's been in Active Directory for at least a day, and we're within our snapshot time, in addition to the machine itself, we have the actual objects in the Active Directory database so we can back that up. And similarly for DNS: all the records, all the zones, DHCP.

It would also be really great for DSS if they could somehow integrate it with Microsoft's technologies at a modular level. In general, I would like to see more integration with Microsoft at an item level. It already backs up the machine itself. We have the virtual machine which contains the database with DNS or the DHCP or Active Directory, but the restore operations, from a bare-metal restore like that, is technically very cumbersome. I don't know if it would just be a lot of built-in PowerShell scripting where it exports the data, saves that export in Rubrik somehow, and then imports it back in using a reverse method, but I think it would be really helpful if it could.

At one point I thought it would be really great to use it almost like SEPM where you could have modules or files where, instead of restoring back to its original location, you could distribute it to all of your restore points. I've walked back on that somewhat. I think that's a little too outside of the focus for Rubrik.

I personally have been using Rubrik for almost five months. It was deployed before I was working at my place of occupation. I used to work in higher education and I did the backups and the disaster recovery at that organization, amongst other things. When I came onboard at my present occupation, they said, "Here's the backup you're going to use, here's the system that we bought into, it's this thing called Rubrik." I said, "Cool. You've seen one system, you've seen them all. They all work." I believe the company has been using it for about a year.

Rubrik is incredibly stable. I'm getting out of that mode of thinking with Rubrik, "Well, maybe it won't work this time. Maybe it'll be down." It's never been down, it's never been inaccessible. If I can't connect to it, I'm typing the URL wrong. That's it.

We had other systems that are homegrown systems or even that were purchased. I don't know if there were technical aspects that were outside of our control, or that we just aren't mitigating or managing very well, with them. But as far as Rubrik is concerned, I've never had an issue accessing that on-prem system — and that's true even for our DR system which is technically on-prem but "over there," very far away. That includes nodes, the cluster. It's just been very good.

We have a lot of Rubrik, a lot of "bricks". If we needed more, we'd just buy more. The horizontal scaling is really great. I don't think we need anything immediately. But I could definitely imagine a moment in the past — not that I know that this happened — where we had ten nodes instead of the 50-something nodes we now have at each site, and we needed more and we put in more. I could totally see it all just working. It would just all of a sudden get better.

If we were ever pressed and at a point where we need something better, we needed more, I would imagine Rubrik would have a solution for us and it would work 100 percent. Whether that would be to PoC some new hardware and verify that it would actually improve our situation, or tweak a setting, or do a site survey to figure out what we're using and how to help, they would either get what we are using right now to work better, or they would figure out what we need to make it better moving forward.

That's scalability in a lot of ways. That's technical scalability in being consistent and stable and being able to improve and evolve. And that's stability and scalability and not having to plan your business processes around what should be a no-brainer issue. It's something that shouldn't drive your business. It should allow your business to be driven in whatever direction it needs to go. It should be something that just works, and so far I've seen it just works.

We have over 2,000 employees, and every one of those employees has some form of a computer and some have multiple: a laptop, or a laptop and a virtual machine, or just a virtual machine, or a laptop and two virtual machines. It's a big environment. We have hundreds of Windows Servers and about 100 Linux servers, if not more. We have pretty extensive Microsoft SQL environments which are either always-on clusters or a combination of always-on clusters and available clusters, and then we have some Oracle Databases as well.

I don't remember the exact number of what we're currently supporting in Rubrik, but I know it is a lot. We've integrated it in such a way — and this is a fairly normal process, but it's great — that whenever we put a machine online, part of the workflow is to get it to back up into Rubrik. Whenever we decommission things, it's to remove those backups 90 days after we remove the physical or virtual server. We keep backups X number of months after we remove the machine, just in case, depending on what our data retention policy is.

It's ingrained. We're invested. We made the jump.

While this might not count as a "tool," the support methodology with Rubrik is really interesting. When we need to do anything that is "invasive," if I have a question about how many upgrade-blocking things are in place, I open a support window, a ticket, and usually within ten minutes I'm contacted by someone, a real person, not just an automated system, at Rubrik.

It's really good. In my previous job to this one, I never really had an experience where the first response that I got back wasn't just an automated, robo-caller saying, "We've received your ticket, we will call you in a moment," and then two days later they would call. With Rubrik, you do get an email saying, "We've received your ticket and someone's going to call you." But within ten minutes, usually, and very rarely within any longer than 30 minutes, there is a real person on the phone calling me, who knows my name and is very aware of the situation. They're not asking me for a ton of information that I've already given in the ticket. They're really top-notch. And the support is integrated really well into the product.

That's not to say that we need support because things are broken. The support is there as an aid, as a tool for us. 

We upgraded a month ago to the version we're on. We're planning on upgrading to the latest version, which I think is 5.03. The great thing is that we're really close with support. They work well with us. We don't upgrade to beta or anything like that, but whenever something big is coming down, they'll usually let us know. We'll talk to them about it and they'll tell us "Hey, this is a cool thing that maybe you guys can utilize."

We replaced Avamar with Rubrik and it assumed the exact same role that Avamar had. I never got to use Avamar. It was decommissioned before I got to my current company.

When I worked in higher education, because we didn't have a lot of money to buy solutions, a lot of it was open-source. So I was the support and I was the deployment and I was the debugger and I was the guy that had to code all the integration. It was hard for me to have a vision of, and architect, how we were going to use things. Back then, we needed to use something and I needed to make it happen.

So in a lot of ways, Rubrik is my first big, differentiating factor in backup and restore software. It's not like we weren't able to do it at my previous organization, but this is a completely different realm. It's a totally different level with Rubrik. I'm not saying that Avamar wouldn't have been a similar feeling. But I hear what other people on the team who were using Avamar before are saying, and I get the feeling that Rubrik is leaps and bounds better in terms of validating that the backups actually happened and that they're there.

In terms of deployment of the solution, it was vendor-aided. Rubrik helped through our SEs. If I had to guess, it would probably be less than half-a-dozen people who were a big part of the deployment, data center access and data center deployment notwithstanding. Some people had to go and plug and rack things.

We aren't interested in lagging behind as far as updates go. We're pretty good about updating to the latest version. The only reason we haven't done so right now is because it's in use. We continue to use it and the organization I work for is big. There are a lot of teams using it. So it's hard finding the time in the day where we can disconnect everything, upgrade the system, and then reconnect everything. That's on our side where we're trying to juggle all the teams that are making use of the product.

I believe our company has seen return on investment by going with Rubrik, although I can't talk about it in detail. I'm not a finance guy. But from the way I hear people talk about previous products we were using, and from my personal experience of wasted time in managing and deploying and supporting free or open-source software, I believe there is ROI. We've definitely done whatever was necessary to make the cost worthwhile.

I remember hearing that we purchased a multi-year, contractual agreement. I don't know if we purchased the hardware outright or if it's a lease-to-own scenario.

My advice would be in the form of a question. If you have the money to purchase Rubrik, the real question is do you want success? Do you want it to work? Because if you want it to work and you want it to be easy — I don't know if Rubrik has won awards for support and service, although I feel like they should have — if you want that support for the few times that you need it, then you go with Rubrik.

It's a really good, seamless system. It's a no-brainer, sometimes. It just works.

I met up with them at VMworld and I actually got to talk to one of the people who was writing the PowerShell modules that I was using for an automation piece that I was writing. I got to ask that person, developer-to-developer, why did you make this decision? I asked a couple of very in-depth questions, and I don't get to do that with a lot of other companies, the companies that are just a logo or just a payment box and a data center. I don't feel Rubrik is a payment box and a data center. It's more than that, it's bigger than that, and that's really good. There are communities out there for Rubrik and I can speak with other developers and other teams that have implemented Rubrik, and that's awesome. It's not a support portal and it's not a place where you go to air your grievances. You go there to have fun, you go there to learn.

I don't know that I've ever used a product that's been quite like it. There are a couple of products that are similar. You definitely get a lot out of Pure Storage, which is very much the same thing, but that's storage, not backup and restore. The advice I would give is: It's not charity software, it's not "for-free" software. It does cost, but what you're buying is a solution that will actually work. It will carry whatever weight you want to give it. And you're also getting the team that helped make it great.

We have not needed to use Rubrik's ransomware recovery yet. Thankfully we've been spared from having to utilize that component. But when I was at VMworld 2019 recently and I was watching a class on ransomware recovery, it was one of those things where thought, "Wow, I didn't even really know we had this." But we totally have this. We have Rubrik, and this is neat. I ended up talking to one of our SEs about it after the fact, and he said, "Yeah, well, you haven't needed it and hopefully you never will."

I believe some of our application developer teams are using Rubrik. They might not realize they're using it though, because a lot of the integration we put in is to back up the machines that they do work on, but they don't realize that we're backing them up. That's kind of sneaky. We're devious like that. We try to protect our users even from themselves sometimes.

For day-to-day maintenance there are only two or three people. I'm one of them, and I have another member on my team who is involved. We also have one of the database administrators who plays a big role in it. My passion, and where I fit perfectly in the team, is doing a lot of scripting. I'm a general-purpose solutions engineer with a focus in PowerShell, Active Directory, and Microsoft integration.

I don't like typically giving tens, because that says there's no room for improvement. But functionally, it's a 9.99999, which rounds up to a ten.