Rubrik Reviews

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have it onsite and in the cloud. We also make use of their SaaS offering as well.

Primarily, we back up our VMware estate. We back up Azure VMs and Office 365 as well as some physical boxes.

We used to be on r348, so now we're on r6408.

Rubrik provides us with all our backup services: onsite backups, Office 365 Backups, and Azure Backups (IaaS).

We can now just point the solution at our virtual environment and know that we are protected. No longer do we have to manage backup jobs. The simplicity of the SLA-based policy automation means that we are just protected.

Rubrik sits alongside things, like the VMware SRM product, so we can use it in a PowerShell integration. We can test and verify our backups using the Live Mount functionality. That is saving us probably one or two days a month.

Rubrik is a faster unit from a hardware perspective. Things, like Live Mount, mean we can bring services back straightaway, then have them transition back into the live storage in the background. Because we can use Live Mount to do instant restores, a restore is now a five-minute job. Then, the rest of it is done in the background, rather than doing something for an hour before you actually get the restore back.

I have one man-day a week back across the team to do other more important jobs. So, it's not saving us money from that point of view. However, it allows my team to concentrate on the things that matter, rather than having to worry about the backup.

• Backs up all our platforms. 
• Its ease of use and single pane of glass management.
• Performance. 
• Lowers our overall management costs; we don't have to look after it anymore.

The solution's web interface is clean, simple, and easy to use.

Its archival functionality is great. We have used that from day one for Azure. The cloud backup was one of the key reasons to switch.

We use their predictive search. It is very much like your standard, usual search engine type approach. You can type in simple English and get results back from that. The easier the interface is to use, then the more time is saved in other peripheral tasks.

I would like to see the entire Office 365 product suite backed up by Rubrik. For instance, they do SharePoint and Exchange online, but they don't back up Microsoft Teams. So, I would like to see more of the Office 365 suite added into their backup capabilities.

I have been using it for three years.

The stability is fantastic. We have not had any downtime. We have not had any issues with it at all. It has been good and stable.

We have not had to scale too far. We have six nodes at the moment and are capable of going to 32 nodes, if we need to. We don't really make use of that scalability, but I know other customers who do. I would be quite happy to scale it, if we need to.

There are six people who know how to use Rubrik at Cranfield. This is my systems team: cloud engineers and systems admins. 

We used the support services a couple of times early on, because we were quite early adopters. They were fantastic. When you speak to support, you get an engineer who knows what they are doing straightaway. There is no multi-tiered support, so you get someone very quickly who knows exactly what your issues are. Nine times out of 10, we have had a resolution extremely quickly.

After the first month, we did not really use support because the solution worked fine. So, we used support early on, and they were great. Since then, we have not had to use support, which is even better.

Before we had Veeam, we were with Dell EMC Data Domain storage.

We previously were a Veeam customer. With Rubrik, we could replicate directly into Azure. That released the operational costs of having a third-party hosted solution offsite. We have been able to remove that, managing it directly in Azure.

From Rubrik being delivered to it ingesting backups, it took about an hour. To get it out of the box, racked, configured, and ready to go was simple. To be perfectly honest, we have probably never used a product that was as simple as it to deploy.

We had a two-week window set to migrate our backups from the old system into Rubrik. Instead of it taking two weeks, it ended up taking three days, which saved us time tremendously.

They were two IT systems administrators involved in the initial setup and deployment. I have a general team of cloud engineers who do the storage, cloud, and virtualization.

Managing backups, we have saved about 85 percent of the time from our previous solution.

We removed a software product, then removed the servers. We did not have to support servers nor storage arrays that it runs on, having a single platform to do everything. That led to TCO savings.

With our old service, managing the whole environment was about a day a week per person. Now, we are lucky if it is five minutes a day. From a complete solution and backup relation, we are saving 85 to 90 percent of our management time.

Return on investment primarily goes back to time savings. It allows my guys to spend time doing things that I need them to do rather than babysitting quite a labor-intensive backup service.

Originally, we bought the units on perpetual licenses. Now, we have switched to Rubrik Go. I think the Rubrik Go subscription is a better model, where it is based on your onsite environment and you consume what you use.

Going to subscription makes it more affordable because then the university does not have to find so much capital to spend upfront. Knowing that we are entering a deal for a number of years with fixed yearly payments allows me to manage budgets better.

We looked at Veeam with Data Domain, Cohesity, and NetApp. We looked to do it all with Microsoft Azure Backup services. However, the only one that really fit our environment and had the vision for what we were trying to do was the Rubrik solution.

Cost and complexity are probably the main reasons as well as the flexibility of the service that we can get. So, we are on that public cloud journey where services are moving between on-prem and the cloud. Rubrik offered us those enablement services. It allowed us to do the transition pieces that we needed or still need now. So, it was an all in one feature set. At the time, their vision and direction matched our vision and direction.

Make sure you know your environment, so you know what you are putting in it before you start. It really does do what they say it does. The real takeaway is just make sure that you are aware of their products and capabilities, and that you can match them appropriately to your environment.

We haven't had any events of ransomware that required us to do that restore. However, we also have Polaris Radar in place to help us detect ransomware anomalies as well as Polaris Sonar that we use for compliance and malware detection. We have used Polaris for reporting on metadata, but not to extract it anywhere else.

Polaris hasn't necessarily changed our approach, but it has given us extra reassurances around key factors, like governance, compliance, ransomware activity, and cloud mobility. Whilst we have our internal policies and procedures in place, it is a tool that effectively is scanning our entire environment, helping to alert and bring issues to the fore if we have any of those problems.

We use the API to automate some of our processes, but we don't have it integrated into any of our other products.

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

We're using it for the backup of our virtual machines or VMs for the cloud. It is also for the standalone. We have a connector with vCenter, and we are using it for the virtual machine backup.

It is on-premise. We have two Rubrik. We are using one as a standalone, and we are also using one Rubrik in our private cloud. It is an on-premise VMware cloud.

We haven't upgraded the software in the last one year. We do the security patch updates and hardware firmware upgrades, but at the software level, we haven't done any major updates. We are using the same version.

It provides cost savings. Cost-wise, it is beneficial for us. We are protecting more than 3 petabytes of data daily, and we have more than 3,000 plus servers. 

Rubrik is cheap, and you get good performance. 

Its implementation is easy and doesn't take much time. Scalability and high availability are also there.

NAS backup can be improved. We have a NAS share, and we were not able to configure that with Rubrik. We found a solution from Dell EMC called Avamar that has an accelerator for NAS backup. The NAS backup is quicker in Avamar with the accelerator hardware, but in Rubrik, it is time-consuming.

Its reporting can be improved. Sometimes, I need to create reports to know whether something is available or not, how much frontend data is being protected, etc. Rubrik gives a lot of things in the report, which can be confusing. It isn't very easy to get reports. It shows all the backup, index, replication, and everything else in one report. So, I have to export, filter, and then do the calculations. If they can improve these things, it would be good. We are managing services for our customers, and every month, I have to provide reports for different types of KPIs and SLAs. We need to provide KPIs to the customers in terms of:

• How many clients are we protecting?
• How much frontend data are we protecting?
• How much recovery are we doing?
• How many recovery jobs and backup jobs have we performed?
• How many ad-hoc jobs have we performed?
• How many new backup clients are we adding every month?

This is the information that I have to give to the customer to show the effort that we are putting in, but currently, we have to do a lot of manual tasks and customizations. If there is a way to generate such reports, it would be helpful. 

By default, it shows only weekly reports. There should also be monthly and quarterly reports.

We have been using Rubrik for the last one year.

Its performance and stability are fine. We haven't faced any issues in the past year.

It is scalable. We can add a node and scale it. 

In terms of its usage, it is used every day. Currently, we have only five users because we also have other solutions. We also have Dell EMC Avamar and Networker. 

We have been using EMC for the past seven or eight years, and we have recently started moving to Rubrik. When I calculate the ROI for both, there is a lot of difference, and that's why we started using Rubrik.

We are using Rubrik only for the VMware backup. VMware works fine with Dell EMC Avamar and Rubrik. Our environment also has SAP HANA, Oracle, SQL, but we are not using Rubrik for these. We use Dell EMC NetWorker for these.

It was not complex. It was very fast, which is also a good thing about Rubrik. It just takes one day for hardware mounting and connectivity. In three days, we completed everything, including the integration between vCenters.

It was implemented in-house. 

Its maintenance is minimal. Usually, for patching, we take support, and our staff works with the support. Currently, I have three to four people working for the data protection part. They work with Rubrik, and they also work with Avamar.

There is just one cost, and it includes software and hardware. So, everything is included. 

It is better than other solutions in terms of cost. We also have Dell EMC Avamar in our environment, and we have to pay for the hardware and data domain. We also have to pay for the software license for the data protection suite. So, based on my calculations, I find Rubrik cheaper, and we are also getting good performance.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. Technically and operationally, everything is fine. In terms of implementation and cost also, it is fine, but its reporting needs to be improved.

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 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 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.