Rubrik Reviews

We predominantly use Rubrik to back up VMware, VMs, SQL databases, Windows files, NAS data, and EC2 instances in Azure VMs.

We have two data centers with Rubrik installed on the bricks in those locations. Then, we have virtual nodes installed that are at customer sites. We are using it for AWS and a little bit of Azure, as well.

Rubrik covers my need for backup and disaster recovery for customers. We back up in our primary data center, replicate data to a secondary data center, and provide hot mount capabilities for customer VMs in the event of a disaster. We also use it for long-term archiving of on-premises customer workloads.

The SLA-based automation is a lot easier than worrying about what time we schedule jobs and what job needs to run at what time. Having the system determine the priority and scheduling jobs to meet compliance has made it a lot easier.

We have used the Ransomware Recovery feature and it is good. However, I think that it lacks a management-type reporting dashboard. It could be used to show the value in the product because generally, until something happens, it's seen as something that sits in the back end and you wonder if it's ever providing value. 

It has reduced the time we spent recovery testing. We can now automate using a script rather than a human. To do this, we utilize the APIs in PowerShell for generating those automation test restores.

We have a self-service portal for our customers, so our customers can log in and restore files themselves. Previously, that wasn't a capability that was available. In terms of time-saving, it's massive because if we can provide that functionality down to a customer and the customer can restore themselves, it's taken a hundred percent of the workload off of us and empowered the customer to do what they want to do.

The ease of use and innovation are the features that stand out for us. It provides the capability to drive down to the end-user, service desk level one, and use the system with minimal training.

The web interface is excellent, and we really like it. The Google search, capability for file restore, and the ability to integrate the API into third-party products are really good.

The archival functionality is excellent, supporting all the major cloud vendors. For our situation, it supports pretty much all of the archival methods that we would want to use for long-term retention. We archive data for up to seven years.

We have used the API support for integration with vCloud director to create a tenant self-service portal. Our next project will be looking into automation with ServiceNow.

We have used the predictive search feature and it drastically reduces the time it takes to find and restore data for people. It used to take perhaps hours to hot mount an image and then search it for a file. Now, we use the Google-like search to look not only across an individual VM but across the whole environment, with all of the VMs. We can find any file across terabytes of data in under 30 seconds and have a restore done, depending on the size of the file, in generally under five minutes.

The Office 365 protection could be improved. Specifically, the design of deploying a Kubernetes cluster to Azure for protecting Office 365, and only being able to protect in Azure Blob storage, is something that should be improved. Our preference would be to protect external to Azure. We could backup using the local bricks or appliances that we already have from Rubrik or alternatively, have the capability to protect out to AWS using alternative storage that's not visual-based.

I have been working with Rubrik for three years.

Stability-wise, it is really good. We've only ever had one node that needed to be rebooted, which didn't affect the uptime of the system. Excluding upgrades, we've had 100% uptime on the system for the past three years.

The scalability is excellent. We've regularly increased the capacity of Rubrik as we onboard new customers.

Between 30 and 40 people in the company probably use Rubrik, but that's obviously not every day because we have different staff on different rosters, and, being an MSP, we support multiple customers. From our side, we probably have a higher touchpoint of Rubrik given that we are supporting customers that are using it.

Our experience with technical support has been really good. Feature requests are predominantly what we're asking for, and every single time that we've ever asked, the engineering team's been really good at incorporating those features into future product releases. Being able to meet with the engineering teams on the future design of the UI and the actual functionality of the product has been really good.

Having that direct contact with engineering and being able to drive what we want the product to do has been really helpful, and we see that come out in a frequent cadence.

Previously, we had an Avamar data domain backup environment. It meant that anytime we had capacity constraints, what would happen was that Dell would come in and say that it was just as cheap to buy a new unit as it was to upgrade the existing one. It was always a big sell to supply the customer the newest and greatest thing, which sort of capped out at a certain capacity and couldn't really be expanded past that point.

Being an MSP, having expansion capabilities was really key for us. Having the ability to just add nodes, and have that capacity online inside 30 minutes was really fantastic. We know that the investment being made into the existing equipment isn't dead in the water, having to be thrown away later.

Implementing Rubrik has saved us time and money in managing backups, and I estimate that we've saved approximately 80% in terms of time compared to previously. This was in maintaining the system and doing upgrades. In terms of cost, we have had to hire a very expensive backup administrator that was really well versed in the Avamar product, and we constantly had problems with the upgrades once they were done. So, to move down to a lower-skilled and lower-cost resource, and have the task be completed in less time, was a significant dollar saving.

In the past, when we did upgrades, we could be offline for a week troubleshooting. Now, once we do an upgrade, we're back to doing backups within half an hour to an hour. 

We switched for ease of use, the total cost of ownership, and the cost to maintain. It came down to the financial benefits and the time benefits and in terms of ease of use and customer self-service. There were a significant number of reasons why we switched to Rubrik from the other platforms.

The initial setup was very easy. The longest time it took to deploy was getting the network team to configure network ports for us, and the IP addressing. Once that was done, we were up and running within 30 to 40 minutes of the initial deployment.

Starting with the racking and stacking in the data center, the entire deployment probably took half a day for half a petabyte of data protection.

To develop our implementation strategy, we had an initial meeting with Rubrik on the design and requirements from their side, in terms of network connectivity requirements and IP addresses. We had done a little bit of pre-work with the network team to get that up and running, and ready for plugin once the equipment was delivered.

Two of our staff were all that was required. You just need enough to lift and stack the equipment in the data center. We had assistance from a systems engineer at Rubrik.

We don't have anyone dedicated to day-to-day maintenance. I utilize my cloud staff to do the upgrades when required, but once the SLAs are configured, it almost runs itself. My service desk staff does the day-to-day backup checks and restores if needed.

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

When we originally started using Rubrik, it was under an MSP program, where we were paying a subscription fee for the consumption of the appliance. We've since switched over to outright purchase and buy as we need.

The pricing has been quite good from our perspective, in terms of being able to negotiate with the Rubrik team to get the product that we want and be able to sell that out to our end customers.

I can't complain, but nonetheless, I'll always say it could be cheaper.

There are no additional costs in addition to the standard licensing fees that we're aware of.  We haven't implemented the Sonar feature at this stage because it cannot be licensed on a per-customer basis. Rubrik has a multi-tenant functionality, and given that we're an MSP, we provide that capability to our customers. However, Sonar is an all-or-nothing addition, so given the cost of that, we wouldn't be able to sell that to all of our customers. In fact, that is one of our pain points at this time. We would like to be able to enable it on a per-customer tenant basis.

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Rubrik has been our main backup and disaster recovery solution for two campuses.

We are using the hardware appliance, rather than the virtual solution. The environments that we are protecting are 99% virtual and just a couple of physical systems.

The specific systems that we protect are SQL, Oracle, ERP, and our wireless controllers.

We used to have to dedicate a full-time employee just to look at and manage the backups. After implementing Rubrik, we no longer need a dedicated person. It's user-friendly to the point where anybody can just look at it and figure what's going on.

The time we spend on recovery testing has been improved by up to 50%. Similarly, we have saved time in managing our backups. The savings in time for managing our backups is up to 50%.

Using Rubrik has helped to reduce our downtime by up to 50%.

The simplicity of the SLA design is the most useful feature. You just set it and you don't need to come back to it again or worry about it.

The SLA-based policy administration has helped us to adjust the workflow, saving us time. This is because what we have right now is that we set up an SLA based on what the appliance does; for example, it might be an SQL server or an application server.

The web interface is user-friendly, clean, and it provides a good summary of what you're protecting at a glance. It also shows you whether there are jobs running, or not. It is my daily task to look at the web interface to monitor our status.

We use the archival functionality and it seems to work fine. We don't see a conflict with it.

The integration with EMC Isilon works well and it's a really great idea to have Rubrik take the snapshot not just on its end, but on the appliance end, and be able to retrieve it.

We used the predictive search functionality and find that it makes things easier to do. We save a lot of time in trying to figure out whether we need to download a file first, or whether we need to unarchive it.

The reporting, in particular the customization of reports, needs to be improved. It should be more user-friendly and a little bit easier to do. The reports should be less dull, as they are a little bit too technical for management.

When upgrading the software, the data on the node being upgraded should still be accessible from the other nodes.

We have been a Rubrik customer since 2017.

This product is very stable. Each time that we asked to do a backup job or a restore, it simply performs the command. We have not seen any compatibility issues.

There is no maintenance, except for security advisories that Rubrik recommends once in a while.

We have not seen any limitation in the amount of data that we are backing up. Between two locations, we are backing up approximately 40 terabytes.

The support from Rubrik is excellent. They do support tunnels on the back end, and you can simply email support and they will get an answer to you within that hour. Or, if you call, then someone will address your issue right away. 

Previously, we used to have Dell EMC Avamar and we were running into a problem where the backup jobs would conflict with each other. Now, Rubrik does that for us and fixes it. Not only that, but we're uploading to Azure as well. This means that we didn't have to worry about that part and how to configure it. It can be a complicated process, but the Rubrik software made it simpler to do and easy to manage.

This is one of the reasons that we switched to Rubrik.

We also have EMC Isilon, and the backup jobs were taking far too long to complete. It would take days and with Rubrik, there was a significant improvement. I would estimate a 40% cut in the time required to complete a backup.

I find the deployment process very straightforward. It was set up in just a few hours.

The process is basically to rack and stack, then assignment management and data VLAN to the Rubrik appliance.

Three of us were involved in the initial setup. There was me, a colleague of mine, and a Rubrik engineer. The engineer from Rubrik was very professional, insightful, and answered all of the questions that we had about the product.

As a technical person, I don't have the details, but from what I have heard, it can be expensive.

I did not personally evaluate other products but my colleague, who was handling the project, evaluated Veeam and Cohesity.

Rubrik is fully-equipped in the sense that it is a full-service backup appliance. You can search, restore, perform backups, and you can live-mount.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to look at what type of appliance you have and check the compatibility. Review case studies or testimonials from customers who have that appliance to get their feedback on it, and then do a demo.

What I have learned from using this product is that when the appliance does throw an error, it's not typically Rubrik's fault because they do the API calls. It's on the appliance end, so you have to keep it up to date. This is from both a firmware and software perspective.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it as a backup for our memory store. It protects virtual and physical environments for us, all on-prem. The applications being protected include VMware VMs, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, SharePoint, our file services, and operating systems.

The backups are a lot more reliable. That's the core headline. It's taken the onus off making sure that backups run and making sure that we're protected. It gives us time to work on other things proactively. It's a very reliable solution. Our technical team has benefited from it in terms of both time and capacity.

Rubrik has absolutely reduced the time we spend on recovery testing by about 75 percent. It has reduced the time we spend on managing backups by the same amount. The reduction in recovery time is even greater. It's in the Exchange and database stuff that we've really noticed the difference. It's so much easier for the guys in support to recover single files, so the reduction in recovery time is as much as 85 to 90 percent.

And because we've been able to recover more expediently, it has reduced downtime. We don't have a lot of downtime, but we know that there's a safety blanket there if we need it.

When it comes to overall productivity, the team isn't having to manage and check backups on a daily basis, so they're interfacing with our end-users or proactively checking other aspects of the infrastructure and making sure that they're running. That's what the positive effect is. Problems are being headed off before they start causing an impact. From the ITIL problem management perspective, that's fantastic.

The most valuable feature is the speedy restore. It helps in expediting RPOs and RTOs across our core applications.

I would rate the solution's web interface at eight out of ten. It's just fantastic and intuitive. It's so easy to use. I've never done any formal training on Rubrik, but I was able to quickly come to grips with its capabilities. That's a fantastic thing, especially for somebody who is just looking to adopt it, because they don't have to worry about training for their wider support function.

We would like to be able to do granular restores directly from Exchange. Also, more granular management of VM backups would help.

We've been using Rubrik for 18 months. We've got four Briks across two data centers.

The stability is fantastic. We rarely have to engage with Rubrik support.

The scalability is also fantastic.

I have used many other solutions throughout the years. This one just seemed to be quite refreshing at the time. It seemed to be the most cost-effective with the best support options.

We needed to protect our core applications and virtualized environment, which is what Rubrik did.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was a solution in the box. We didn't have to complete much configuration, other than having the right port open on our destination servers and deploying the various agents. It was very easy to configure the vCenter connections and start backing up our virtualized environment.

The trickiest part was figuring out how crawler sits in there. We set up a standalone server for that and installed crawler there. I can recover an entire database and granular emails within 15 to 20 minutes, now that I've practiced.

We're having another one put in and the implementation strategy will be to upgrade the current Brik, have the new Brik upgraded to that version as well, plug it in and it will configure itself, essentially.

We did it with our team and Rubrik support. The Rubrik team have been fantastic for the lifecycle of the product.

We have seen return on investment in Rubrik.

Veeam was also a front-runner in there, but there are a lot of horror stories about Veeam and Exchange backups. That affected the decision. Other differences between Veeam and Rubrik include the level of reliability and support as well as third-party support available from the vendor.

Depending on the size of your environment, I would say go for it. This is a very flexible and reliable product, but I don't know how it would do in a large, enterprise-size infrastructure. I can't comment on that because I've never tested it.

The SLA-based policy automation is just another name for protection group. It hasn't really changed the game. It's just a logical way of grouping the things that you protect and making sure they're all backed up in a similar way. It's good.

I've tried some of the API from Rubrik, to automate the SQL resource, but it took a bit of a backseat. I've toyed with it a little bit, but not to the full extent of its capabilities. So far, the APIs seem fit for purpose. We have also looked into the Polaris SaaS-based framework for extracting metadata, from a risk perspective, but we haven't used it.

There are just 40 of us in IT and about 30 of us have got access to it. I don't think many of them interface with it on a daily basis. The only regular user is probably just one of the infrastructure guys. We use it as a backbone for protecting the data of 900-plus law firm employees.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this product at eleven. It is really good. We are a happy customer.

We came from two different systems. We had one product that was for our campus side and a different product for the hospital side. We wanted to bring those together and not have too many products in one environment. Rubrik covers everything in our VMware, for both campus and hospital. It does all of our backups. Anything that gets backed up for either side now goes through it.

We were siloed out into many different teams on both sides and we had a backup team on campus and a backup team on the hospital side. When those were brought together, the backup teams were dissolved and they were put into the VMware side where they're now managing hardware and server hardware refreshes.

My team is now the storage and backup team and we've taken on that task. Backups are offered as part of pretty much any ticket requesting a new server, for campus or hospital, that is a request for a new server. We spin up the backup at the server creation.

Our Rubrik is all on-prem. We back up our VMware environment and we also do a few physicals. We do some SQL and we do some Oracle.

It depends on what we're recovering, but some recoveries, before Rubrik, would take 30 minutes-plus. Now, similar recoveries that we've done have taken only seconds.

Also, when we first put this into place, we were actually moving to a hybrid cloud approach as well. We were trying to offer server creation as a simple ticket. We were doing this through offering the products, the catalog, and the automation behind everything to spin up the servers and deal out the storage. The two products that we actually have in our environment weren't very friendly with that automation piece but Rubrik, with its SLA policies, makes it very easy for us to say, "Hey, if this is a tier-zero application, we want this SLA applied globally," although there aren't very many of those in our environment. And if it's a tier-one application we can say, "Oh, we want this SLA applied." It does a very good job of keeping things clean in our environment. We also went through making sure we have everything tagged in VMware so that Rubrik can just pull that tag and apply that SLA. So things work pretty smoothly with all of that together.

We use the archival functionality. We tend to keep things on a Brik for a certain amount of time and, of course, it's a larger amount of time for tier-zero applications. And then we archive off to a private cloud that we have here at the university. That definitely keeps costs down because we have a deep and cheap storage solution for that cloud, Hitachi Content Platform. That was one of the main reasons that we went with Rubrik, as well, as it is compatible with HCP. We have quite a few petabytes of that and we wanted to make sure that we could leverage that and use it to our advantage.

Another benefit has been that management time has gone down significantly. Before, we had those two teams, one team for NetBackup and one team for Commvault. Each of those teams had two people on them. Now, we have one person on the storage team who is dedicated pretty much to backups, and the rest of us jump in as needed. We've really been able to consolidate that effort, and since it's an easy to use interface, we were able to pick up and run with that as a storage team. But with NetBackup before, we did have to build out quite a few servers and other stuff to get it into HCP. The whole model behind that, having lots of media servers, was very costly when you add in all of the hardware costs, licensing, et cetera. With this, it's quite a bit cheaper.

And Rubrik has definitely reduced downtime, because if we can spin up a recovery faster to that local CPU and the storage of Rubrik and have it up instantly, we can definitely get back to work sooner.

We do like the instant recovery because, beforehand, we would tell people, "Hey, it's going to take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to spin this up and, in that time, we're going to need your help with certain questions." We would sit there and work with them, but it always took quite a while. Now, we say, "Okay, give me 15 seconds and I can get this back up for you." And within that 15 seconds it's on and the only thing that we have to do afterwards is vMotion it off of the Rubrik storage back to where it should rest.

We also like the web interface. We mainly log in to the node and work from that, but occasionally we will log in and look at things when offsite. It's very intuitive and it works really well.

In addition, the solution's APIs play in with our automation piece for hybrid cloud. We wanted everything to work without manual interaction. We wanted everything to just play through when a ticket is submitted and automatically spin up the backup that we wanted, based on the tag in the VMware object. Our VMware team was the one that mainly looked at those APIs and built all of that out, but they haven't had any issues with it. It's worked exactly as designed.

The interface is still slightly clunky and has room for improvement. They do work with us whenever we mention anything that needs to be done or anything that we want. We find that bringing up the management interface is a little slow and not as intuitive as we would like, but it's been getting better as it evolves.

Rubrik is a somewhat new company, so it needs to become a little more established, and that just comes with time. It's not really too much of a concern or a weakness. It's just something that hasn't happened yet.

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

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

The scalability is wonderful. That is one of our biggest advantages with this. We can scale out as big or as small as we need to. We went with 20 nodes or so at the start and we've got over 40 now. We continue to expand as needed. We're still not all the way done with rolling this out to replace everything, but every year we're getting more and more nodes in there and replacing more and more.

We've covered about 85 percent of our environment. With the other 15 percent, it wasn't that Rubrik couldn't handle it, it's that the budget only allows for so many nodes to be purchased at a time. On top of that, we need to make sure that we do it in a way that's non-disruptive for work, and there are some teams that would be affected by disruption. We need to go a little bit at a time, which is what we've done. 

For the future, I do see us using it more. We have been doing a soft launch on Oracle, because we needed the tool that Rubrik has that allows for integration. That was still in something of an early stage of development, and we weren't comfortable putting it into production until it was in a more developed state. So we have used Rubrik to back up Oracle, but we've gone about using less of the automation pieces that Rubrik offers, and we're using it more as just a landing spot until that is fully developed. That's about the only piece that we're going to use more in the future.

When we have run into issues, we've reached out to our support team at Rubrik and they've been very quick to respond. Whether they're in the office or not, they do take our calls and help us out. It's always a quick response.

They're a newer company, so I'm sure they're still establishing their place, but the escalation teams and everybody that we've worked with have been capable and they've been able to fix our problems without having to bring in too many people.

We had Commvault and NetBackup before. Both of those were based on costly consumption-based licenses, and our CIO really disliked that model. The licenses that we had had been increasing in cost year after year and it just wasn't feasible to keep two separate products that weren't a good fit for the automation piece, for hybrid cloud. And they were on a slightly more pricey model. So rather than going to one or the other, we went out to see if there was anything that made more sense at the time. And that's when we found Rubrik.

With Rubrik, we have an agreement where it isn't license-based, and we are able to add more Briks as needed and more clusters as needed. It makes it extremely easy to expand our backup environment as the need arises.

With the other models out there, you would buy one quota and then you would hit it and prices would change and other things would happen. They have you locked in, no matter what. It was basically a situation where you had to pay whatever price they said you had to pay. With Rubrik, it's been very nice to have all of the equipment in our own data center and to have a little bit more control. For example, if we think we're going to need this much next year, this is what the hardware cost is going to be, and we can pay for any additional capacity that we need. That's been really nice with Rubrik.

Setting up Rubrik was both a little bit straightforward and a little bit of complex. We had the team that sold us the product there with us during setup and we went to add in all of the nodes at the same time. That was something that even that team had thought we could do, and then they remembered, in the middle of adding all the nodes at the same time, that we needed to do it in groups. That does take time. We were putting in something like 16 or 20 nodes, and we had to do it four-at-a-time. We had already done the physical installation and all the cabling, and all that portion. But when we started to add in the nodes, we had to do four and then wait for it to finish on that, and then do another four and wait for it to finish on that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have the r6000 series as the physical appliance. We also have the Rubrik Edge, which is a virtual appliance, depending where it is deployed. So, we have three strategic data centers where we are placing physical appliances. For test purposes and some branch offices, we are using the virtual appliance.

Most of our workloads (98 or 99 percent) are virtual on-prem, then half a percent are physical and half a percent are in the cloud. In the cloud, we have both AWS and GCP, but it is still very light. We are in the process of migrating a percentage of our on-prem workloads into the cloud.

We are in a telecom environment, so we have a lot of homegrown applications based on the Linux operating system. We have MSSQL and MySQL as well on the Linux environment. We are also protecting Windows Active Directory. We don't have a lot of proprietary applications, like SAP, but we have Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Active Directory, a couple of file servers, and the rest are mostly home-developed applications.

The main benefit is that we are secured in terms of workloads. We know that if we need to restore any VMs, or even any files inside a VM, that we will succeed 100 percent. This means that we don't need to spend much time administering the backup environment because we know it is self-healing and efficient. So, we are spending that time on something else, which is always a plus.

We use Polaris. Polaris is the front-end, which provides us a centralized view of all our Rubrik deployments in the company. It is a way to see each event's alert reporting and have a map of the world where you have Rubrik deployments.

A backup solution can help you with downtime. When you have something to correct, then it means that you need an immediate activity/action to restore the service. With Rubrik, we can immediately restore the corrupt data or VM. You don't need to worry about finding, loading, and indexing the date, then finding the relevant information to initiate a restore. With Rubrik, we don't need all those activities. We just need to do the search, click for the right VM, and push the restore button. That is it. We can probably reduce the downtime by a factor of 10 without any depth.

Rubrik's web interface is an eight out of 10. It is very easy to use, clear, and responsive. You don't need to click into many different places to get the information that you are looking for; it is intuitive. I like it a lot.

The SLA-based policy automation that Rubrik brought to market five years ago was really a game changer. In the previous backup product, you always managed your backups on a job basis, so what you needed to do is, to say, "Okay, I'd like to backup that specific workload, but I need to stop at this time." With Rubrik, it is completely different. You just need to configure an SLA, saying, "Okay, I would like to have a daily backup," or "I would like to do a backup every six hours. However, Rubrik, start when you think it's the most appropriate time." Then, you don't need to manage maintenance or backup windows anymore. In our environment, where we have based our data centers in the US, Europe, and Asia, it is not a headache anymore to configure our backup jobs, since Rubrik deals with it. When you configure the Rubrik environment, it is a few clicks. Then, you are good to go, and it's already doing backups by itself.

The solution’s archival functionality is very interesting because you have a lot of options. You can either archive on-prem or in the cloud. On-prem, you have the choice between object storage and block storage, which is nice, as it fits any environment. Archiving in the cloud is very easy as well. There is no support in GCP and AWS history in Glacier, so it is a very good option. 

It is easy to offload your local storage. If your brick is becoming full, you have two options: 

1. You buy an extra brick, expanding the cluster, but it has a cost. 
2. You can decide to archive your data. This means that the snapshots that you have on the Rubrik cluster can be migrated to another place. Another place can be either in the same data center or in the cloud. This is a great option, and we are using it.

We are scripting a lot using the Rubrik API to gather some information about usage, monitor what is going on, or do some very specific actions, like initiating a backup from the command line within a scripted environment. So, it is very handy.

There is a search feature inside the cluster. So, if you want to restore a specific file from a snapshot, you can then do a search inside the snapshot. The time that it takes to find and recover applications/files is almost instant. In the previous backup software that we were using, we didn't have the ability to dig inside and browse the snapshot, or even search inside the snapshot to find the required file. We can find instantly what we were looking for by searching inside a snapshot because Rubrik is maintaining a metadata DB where we can find anything that we want. Whether it is on-prem or archived already in the cloud, we can find anything using this search mechanism.

There is always room for improvement with some shortcuts for the web interface. They could make it even more beautiful. While there is always room for improvement, it is already a great product from a UI point of view.

It would be nice if we could do a live mount of the Nutanix AHV VMs, but this is not really an issue on the Rubrik side. This is more an issue on the Nutanix side because they need to share the relevant API to allow Rubrik to do that. I know Rubrik is intensively discussing with Nutanix to solve this problem, or at least to open this functionality to the rest of its customers. That would be nice to have the Nutanix AHV live mount, but this is probably for the future. I know it is on the roadmap, but it is not easy because there are some politics between the two vendors.

Today, there is no way to migrate archives from one location to another. This is being evaluated by Rubrik at this time. I know because I am pretty much involved with the Rubrik engineering team as a customer advocate.

I have been using it for about four years.

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

Like many other modern solutions, Rubrik is architected as a web-scale solution. This means that if you are running out of space, just stack another brick on top of the existing ones. You can stack bricks until a couple of racks are full. It is very easy. 

Scalability-wise, when we expand the cluster, it is non-destructive and non-disruptive. So, we can stack, and while it is stacking, we can still have backups running. Nobody notices that you are actually expanding.

We have active administrators of the Rubrik platform at this time.

If you have any issues with the software, then the Rubrik support is trained and responsive enough to get you covered. I would rate the technical support as a nine (out of 10).

Rubrik selected a bunch of customers who are active with the product, trying to make it evolve. From time to time, we do meetings saying, "Okay, what could be nice to have in the future?" They are taking advice from the real users, and I am a part of that.

We were looking at a way to standardize our data security platform, because we were using a lot of different software, like Veeam, Aranda, HPE Data Protector, etc. In total, it was something like six or seven different backup solutions. It was completely scary to manage on a day-to-day basis. Depending where in the world that we needed to do backups, it was a different software. 

It was completely crazy to manage, not only because you needed specific knowledge of the product, but also because every product didn't have the same behavior and capabilities. This was one of the many issues that we had. Then, we decided to standardize into a common platform everywhere, and that was why we switched to Rubrik. 

The main driver was to find a way to back up over where Nutanix stressed us, because we are a Nutanix customer. At that time, not many vendors were able to protect Nutanix AHV workloads, but Rubrik was one of them, and we decided to do a trial with them. It was absolutely successful in each aspect. It was easy to use and efficient. You didn't need to worry about our restore tests, which were very easy. So, the use case that we have was to protect our Nutanix workloads and SQL DBs. Also, the flexibility that Rubrik has given us is absolutely crazy.

15 minutes is the time that you need to deploy a Rubrik cluster from unboxing to the first backup. In other words, the initial setup is very easy and straightforward. As soon as you have the network ready to accept the hardware, the right credentials to configure the different vCenters in the Nutanix cluster, and all the backup elements, 15 minutes is the time that you need to be up and running.

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

Rubrik has reduced the time that we spend on recovery testing. Previously, when somebody was requesting to restore a file, everybody was trying to escape that task. Now, it is the opposite. Everybody wants to do it, because it is so simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We primarily use it for data backup for VMware as well as AIX, which is an IBM platform. We also use it for the value-adds that Rubrik brings, including Live Mount.

We are on version 5.2 right now. We upgrade every little while. The version of the appliance is the r500 series.

Our environments are virtual and physical. We don't protect anything in the cloud currently.

Rubrik protects AIX versions 6 and 7, then primarily Windows and Linux hosted on VMware vSphere. We also do some standalone Linux and Windows boxes. As a subset of the Windows, we protect a lot of SQL Server databases. We do some IBM databases as well, but primarily SQL Server on Windows.

We like that Rubrik is SLA-based. Instead of us defining specific policies to specific servers, we create the SLAs which are kind of the foundation of your backup strategy. We then assign objects, servers, databases, or whatever we're protecting to an SLA. The SLAs work well, as in, they do what you expect, which seems intuitive. However, coming from our previous backup solution, backup software and intuition don't always go together. So, we are very happy.

Their Live Mount technology uses Rubrik as storage, while using our Cisco UCS Blades as compute for rapid restores of backups, which is really awesome. That is one of the biggest value-adds that Rubrik provides. It saves time as well as being easy and works well. Our previous backup solution restores were cumbersome, time-consuming, and labor intensive to do. They required a lot of validation. With Rubrik Live Mount, you can restore a system in well under a minute, whereas it would take up to hours in the past.

Live Mount is where we do the majority of our big recoveries, unless it is a file recovery. A file recovery takes a few minutes to restore to where the file in the event a file was accidentally deleted by a user, etc. There has been at least a 90 percent reduction in recovery time based on our previous solution, from the need to recover something to when it's actually recovered went from hours to minutes.

We really like their SQL tools around SQL Server as well as the ability to do transaction log backups and restore to a point-in-time based on those transaction logs. We also like the restore options: restoring in place or mounting a database to another server. Their toolset around SQL Server works really well.

We like the web interface a lot. It is simple, but powerful.

We like the solution’s archival functionality. We currently archive offsite to an NFS store in one location and a cloud S3 location for some other objects. We have been happy with the way that both of those work.

We have used their search, which is powerful.

I would like to see Rubrik better integrate with Microsoft Active Directory. Instead of just backing up a full domain controller, I would like the solution to have Active Directory object knowledge so we can restore specific objects in Active Directory versus restoring the whole domain controller. 

I have been using this solution for about two and a half years.

We are happy with the stability. As far as the stability of the solution, like the software itself, it seems like it has been good. Obviously, it is not perfect, but we have been happy with the upgrade cadence and software release cadence that Rubrik has released with stability fixes and/or bug fixes.

As far as the company goes, they had probably more questions a couple of years ago, but now it seems like Rubrik is one of the big players in the data management sphere, and it doesn't seem like the company is going anywhere, at least as far as we know, which is a comforting thing.

We haven't had to do too much on the scalability front. However, the on-prem scalability makes sense. We are happy with it. We have currently an eight-node cluster on-prem, and if we needed to add more storage, we would essentially add another node or two to our cluster. So, we are happy with our options. We could scale from small to very large easily and with minimal configuration changes.

We have been very pleased every time that we have had to contact their support. Their support has been really good. 

We came from an old IBM solution that was complex. 

The initial setup is straightforward. The hardware install and initial setup went very smoothly and quickly. 

The only issue, two and a half years ago, was that we didn't have a great recommendation on how to back up specifically large servers. There are two different ways that we could do it: 

1. With a full VM snapshot.
2. With a file set level, which basically goes through the server based on a filter and only backs up specific files. 

We initially did the file set method, even though we were backing up everything. That was not the most effective way of doing this. We reversed course and just started backing up everything via vSphere snapshots, which works so much better. However, we probably could have received a little better guidance initially on that front from the guy who came onsite to set the appliance up.

Initial setup, after the planning, was probably only about four hours before we started getting backups. It was about a full week before all the backups were complete. We have some very large file servers that we were backing up. Some of those took a long time to finish for that first full backup.

We switched from our previous backup platform. We just transitioned over to Rubrik, shutting off the backup of the old system one day, then starting to back up with Rubrik the next day. Because most of our servers or objects are in vSphere, our Rubrik integration with vSphere made this very easy.

The main thing would be the time savings for those of us in IT operations. In the past, coming from a complex backup solution that involved disk, tape, and rotating tapes, it ended up being almost a full FTE's job to manage and babysit the backup solution. We are down to under a quarter of an FTE. My manager says that it provided us with an FTE savings, and that frees us up to work on other more value-add things, because backup is not a huge value-add. It's necessary, and Rubrik has a lot of value-add features, but the backing up data isn't a value-add until you need it. So, we are saving between 35 and 40 hours a week.

It is like an insurance for when the inevitable happens. You don't know you need something until the minute you need it, then you need it right away.

Rubrik is not the cheapest solution, but we've been happy with the time savings that we have seen. At least from what we have spent so far, we have been happy with the return on investment.

We did a trial of Polaris Radar, which is ransomware detection. We saw value there, but it didn't fit in our budget, at least for the fiscal year that we were working with it.

I don't think Rubrik Go was an option when we initially purchased this solution.

We evaluated an upgraded version of our IBM solution, because our version was old. We also evaluated Veem. We have been very happy with our selection of Rubrik.

Definitely consider Rubrik if you value a simple, elegant, powerful backup tool.

We did a trial of Rubrik Polaris Radar, which automatically detects file changes that would be an indication of a ransomware infection. We were happy with that. In the event of ransomware, their cloud-based tool would detect it. Also, we would be happy with the way that we could recover. Thankfully, we have not had to put this in practice. We haven't had to recover from ransomware. However, in every test that we have done, we have been very happy with how it works and the concept of immutable backups. Once the data is backed up, it can't be changed. This is important for ransomware recovery, so we are happy with how this would work in the event that we would ever have to use it.

Rubrik's pre-built integrations or API support for integration with other solutions are some things that we would like to explore more in the future, other than just referencing some basic PowerShell commands or referencing the API through some basic PowerShell.

I don't have an example of where we had to recover something from a catastrophic failure, which is good. However, we have confidence that if we did need to, there would be a reduction in downtime because of their recovery features.

Biggest lesson learnt: We don't need to spend as much time managing backups as we used to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We worked directly with Rubrik to help with the deployment.

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

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

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

They have a very straightforward pricing model.

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The primary use cases of Rubrik are to back up critical files, servers, documents, VMs, and partition drives from servers. We protect our Linux and Unix OSs.

I am using both their physical appliances and software. We are using it on SaaS.

The SLA-based policy automation affects us greatly because we don't need to monitor it daily. We just allow the SLA to screen and do a daily checkup, e.g., if the SLA proceeded and or if it failed. This makes our work much easier. 

We use the archival functionality in terms of our cloud operations. Instead of buying extra hardware or extra large devices for Rubrik, we attached it and transferred our on-premise data to the cloud. We had a seamless connection from the AWS platform.

Lately, we appreciate the archival to cloud and search finder for restorations, where we don't need to back up or restore the overall backup of a drive. Instead, we just retrieve specific files from specific servers.

Rubrik's web interface is user-friendly. It takes time to understand every aspect of the system and interface, but it is understandable and quite easy to use.

It is seamless with fast backup storage.

The reporting in the dashboard and reporting for extractions both need improvement. I would suggest making them easier to understand and use, not just out-of-the-box. We should also be able to customize them.

I have been using Rubrik for around two years.

We have had some minor issues, but they have been solved. In terms of backup, it has been quite good and works as expected.

I would rate the scalability as a three out of five because additional hardware is a must if in terms of infrastructure loads. In terms of archival functionality, the scalability is good because you can achieve that through cloud storage.

We have four Rubrik clusters with 41 DB in them. I would assume that we are backing up around 100 terabytes of data from the company.

We have three system administrators who handle the infrastructure side of the company.

In terms of escalating tickets or bugs, they are very quick in terms of their support system.

We used a different solution called Legato, which is an old school tape backup solution. We switched to Rubrik because of:

1. Costs.
2. Time.
3. Hardware updates and outdated technology.

Compared to the way that we were previously backing up different files and servers, using Rubrik is as easy as clicking a button, except using dates.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Rubrik's partner (Trend Micro) usually does the heavy work on it. It only takes around three to four hours to set up, depending on the company's infrastructure and security. We had a very good experience during the deployment process.

We were able to decrease the process around five minutes using Rubrik from a day's work.

It trims down recovery testing time from eight hours to 10 to 15 minutes.

In terms of usage, Rubrik has allowed us to retrieve data 80 to 90 percent faster than our previous technology.

We reviewed Commvault, Rubrik, and Dell EMC. Rubrik won out in stability, support, and functionality.

Know your needs first and understand if Rubrik can provide the solution to your problems. In terms of backup, Rubrik is a top-notch technology. In terms of user-friendliness, UI, and the price, it is suitable for a company or startup to consider this solution.

Time matters in terms of receiving and backing up data. Having a solution that can fit in terms of time management can help a company thrive.

We don't actually backup cloud systems. We only do archival. We upload the on-premise data to the cloud.

I would rate Rubrik as a 10 (out of 10).

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).

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 instant recovery aspect of the solution is the most valuable aspect for me. It can recover the entire VMO database within five seconds. It's really quick. The database can be recovered on the local backup machine disk, and then brought up by the virtual machines.

Of course, afterwards, you need to refresh your vMotion back to the original storage area. That takes a long time, maybe hours, however, the instant recovery portion only takes seconds to recover on the SSD hard disc. 

The initial setup is easy.

The solution would be better if it was cheaper and cost us less to use.

The solution could be more user friendly. The current UI could be improved considerably, which would make it more comfortable to navigate.

The solution needs Continuous Data, or CDP. It may be that we don't have it because we have an older version. It may be on version 5.2 or 5.3 already.

The solution needs to be more secure and needs to better protect against ransomware.

I've been using the solution, at this point, for about one and a half years.

The solution is very stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze.

I believe the solution can scale pretty well. I haven't actually tried it out at our organization, therefore, it's hard to say for sure.

There only a couple of admin personnel on the solution at our company.

We have dealt with technical support in the past. In fact, we have three open cases right now. They've been pretty good in terms of the service they provide. They are responsive and are able to fix the problems we have.

Before we began using Rubrik, we used to use HP Data Protector. We decided to switch due to the fact that the HP solution we had was getting to be too old and we realized simply upgrading it would have cost us quite a bit of money.

The old solution we had was using a tape library to backup the data and it took too long to backup all the data on the tape. We were trying to find another better way or faster way to backup our data source. That's why we ultimately chose Rubrik.

We found the initial setup to be very straightforward. It wasn't complex for us in any way.

The deployment process took a few hours. It didn't take too long.

The cost of the solution is quite high. It's not cheap.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with Rubrik.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are using, however, it may be a variation of version five.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. If it had a friendlier user interface, I would probably rate it higher.

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.

I don't know if it is the best or the worst but it's very easy to install and very easy to balance. Sometimes that it's a problem because the installer of these data gets extremely scared because it's so easy. The product is easy to install, easy to balance, and easy to work with. Another really good point is the instant recovery.

The recovery of virtual machines and SQL databases is really fast. I mean half the time or less, which is absolutely great.

I have been using Rubrik for one and a half years. 

They could make it a little bit more robust and more reliable.

We don't require any technical people for maintenance. When Rubrik was first establishing itself, we hired help for the first one or two times but the rest is so easy. The very first one, somebody has to do it, but for the second or third one, you can do it by yourself. It could be very good or very bad, depending on what you think. If you are trying to sell professional services, with Rubrik you are dead.

We've had support from Rubrik, we opened a couple of requests. It was a really fast response and they solved the problem very easily. We don't a lot of experience, just a couple of tickets but well, pretty well solved.

The initial setup was easy. The PowerPoints take something like an hour or two. Whatever the goal is, if you find problems, and you find a heavy percent of the problems are networking problems, you have the ports that need to be opened, and the person in charge of opening the ports is on vacation. But from PowerPoint to real life, there is not a big difference. The PowerPoint says an hour or two but starting from scratch to do backups, takes a few hours.

There is not a big difference between Rubrik and Cohesity. Both companies and both products are clearly the same. There are a lot of differences between Rubrik or Cohesity and the old-fashioned kind of solutions like Veritas. Rubrik represents the new way of doing backups and recoveries, it's totally different, more efficient, and easier. It's absolutely an advantage.

My advice would be when you are thinking about implementing Rubrik you need professional services and proper briefings. You need advice on-site and for configuring the system because the new way of doing things, deduplication, and all those kinds of things, is going to be a necessary configuration to run your backup system. It is very important to do it right at the beginning. To do that, you have to work closely with whatever the partner or Rubrik people you can involve.

I would rate Rubrik an eight out of ten. 

The recovery of Oracle databases is too complicated. It is not something that helps the DBA, the Database Administrator, but it should be done by the backup person like many other solutions. Everything is ready for the DBA to recover the database. It is a way of doing things, but I don't think you should give the backup people the ability to do it.

We use this solution extensively - it helps with fast recovery scenarios and some ransomware issues. The solution is used by the operations department and I believe there are more than five people involved in maintenance, most are storage or network admins. I'm an engagement architect.

The live mount capability is the most valuable feature in the product because it reduces the complexity and gives us good RTO.

The user interface could be improved, it's pretty rough.

I've been using this solution since it was introduced into the market about four or five years ago. 

There is good stability in this solution, it's reliable.

The solution is highly scalable and reliable. We have a lot of users in the company, most are storage and backup admins. Not everyone has access to the backup system. 

Rubrik customer support is excellent. 

I have used Veritas in the past. We switched to Rubrik because the solution offered more. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. Deployment to about three hours, no more. The setup time really depends on net issues. 

This product is easy to manage. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

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

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

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

Our deployment of the solution is primarily on-prem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

We like this product because of its simplicity, pricing and reliability. 

This solution is stable.

This solution is scalable.

The tech support is extremely helpful.

It was a straightforward setup. It was simple to do.

It is a great value, but its cost is still high.

• Daily backups at different intervals
• Audits
• Live mounting of production servers
• DR

We are a 90 percent VM environment. We have a different OS environment, as well as databases.

The product is simply easy to use, efficient, and its out-of-the-box configuration just works. The SLA policy set makes it easy to manage and forget about time conflicting backup schedules. We have had a few recoveries, and this solution worked very well.

The live mounting and compatibility of different operating systems is great. Rubrik can also serve as a secondary host for emergency recoveries. It is fast and efficient.

I would like to have a built-in index searching ability of files/system files within the Rubrik interface to determine if a file or item exists, rather than just recovering it, and then doing a search for the file afterwards.

No issues.

No issues.

Support is very friendly, easy to work with, and showed great expertise in the product. 

We used Avamar, and it was complicated.

The initial setup is straightforward. We were up and running within an hour.

We had the vendor team onsite, and it was super fast to set up.

As little downtime as possible. 

The product is not cheap, but for good reason. It simply works and is very fast.

We thought about Veeam.

Give it a try and find out for yourself if it is for your environment.

We are an MSP and offer Rubrik as a backup service to customers on private and public cloud environments and internally managed environments. We run the solution against VMware and Hyper-V with minimal physical systems.

Currently, there is no support for image-level backups on systems in Azure and AWS from Rubrik. Presently we use agent-level backups however this is not ideal for fast whole system recovery. The next version (4.2) has support for image backups, and this will be investigated for functionality when released.

The legacy backup solution required large capital expenditure upfront and was not easy to scale, required a high degree of technical expertise to operate, and featured time-consuming upgrades which required a lot of troubleshooting post-upgrade. The system also had many limitations around the number of concurrent hot mount operations.

Rubrik, on the other hand, is very easy to scale, can be operated by junior staff, and upgrades to date have been seamless. Each time we add a Brik we gain additional backup and restore performance. They claim performance at up to 30k IOPS per Brik, however, I suspect the actual figure to be below that. Having said that, we can instantly recover an entire customer's environment in minutes and run happily on the system until a storage vMotion is completed to production storage without any issues.

Google-like file search is another invaluable tool to quickly find and restore files directly to your browser. This feature has saved significant time for end users who can’t remember where they saved a file.

• Google-like file search
• System scaling
• Ease of use/upgrade/addition of capacity.
• Frequent development cycle which is typically 3 months between feature releases.
• Direct feedback to product managers is invaluable, features we have requested are typically added to the next product release.
• Product support team is excellent, with issues typically being resolved the same day.
• Although not in large-scale use at the moment, the ability to convert a VMware image backup to an EC2 instance will be of great use moving forward to provide disaster recovery to the cloud when required.

• Global management of multiple systems is lacking, as is reporting across multiple installed units. This is presently a development item in the Polaris platform, however the current capabilities do not justify the price tag.
• MFA/SAML support to improve security for login to the backup system.
• Image-level backup for Azure and AWS with storage held outside of the Azure/AWS account so that if an account breach does occur backups and primary data would not be compromised in a single attack.

No

No

Avamar with Data Domain, which was expensive and hard to manage, and had poor product updates.

The initial setup was done in one to two hours, with racking the equipment being the most time-consuming part of the install.

If you are unsure, get a POC unit and see how easy backups can be to manage, and how easy restores are.

Veeam, Avamar, and Cohesity.

As a financial company, we are under stringent data compliance, availability, and integrity rules. We use Rubrik to enhance governance of data archiving, as well as the backup and restore production environment consisting of multiple converged systems. We are also looking into the feasibility of using Rubrik as part of the firm's BCDR efforts and enhancement of the development environment.

Rubrik has led to improvement by reducing the amount of failed backups, leading to a reduced workload in IT operations. It has a streamlined user interface, provides an improved tech support experience, and reduces the time required to locate and restore data.

Automation with PowerShell allowed us to realize the additional benefits of integrating Rubrik with other PowerShell-capable systems within the same framework. 

We run Microsoft Exchange on physical servers, and we are looking into simplified physical Microsoft Exchange server backup and restore capabilities.

Currently, more properties and methods are exposed via REST API when compared with PowerShell. Improving PowerShell integration would greatly simplify Rubrik management.

We use the Rubrik solution to back up our private cloud environment with hundreds of virtual machines.

The old method of backup wasn't the right product for our cloud solution. The restore and backup times took to long.

The most important feature is the instant recovery of virtual machines. It allows us to restore services in minutes.

We need one system to manage all the Rubrik clusters. We are now looking into Rubrik Polaris as a solution.

It's a very stable solution.

Not at all.

All of the Rubrik engineers know everything about their products.

We used NetBackup in the past but it didn't fit with our new requirements.

Straightforward.

A Rubrik engineer configured the system for us at location.

The instant recovery is what we needed. I don't know the exact ROI.

I can't speak for others, but look at what you require in your environment.

NetBackup, Veeam and Cohesity

Have a look at the Rubrik API Playground to automate a lot of processes.

We are searching for a new backup product that reduces man hours and helps us automate more of the backup and recovery process for our MSP team.

We used to primarily be a Veeam shop when it came to doing backups in our data center and I never thought I would look for another product. However, some issues started cropping up with very large virtual machines that Veeam didn't have an easy way to solve. I decided to try out Rubrik. I can tell you that it was one of the best decisions we have made. It fixed all of our backup issues and cut backup remediation to nearly nothing. We've gained at least ten hours a week and I never have to worry about whether something is being backed up or not.

Automation functions, image based backup, and the ability to instantly recover anything from files to databases.

We have also implemented CloudOn which allows us to deploy backed up virtual machines stored offsite in Azure instantiated as an Azure virtual machine and spun up. It's a perfect scenario for low cost, full disaster recovery.

I wish it had image-level backups available for Hyper-V 2012. I additionally would like for it to implement some of the functions that Veeam Cloud Connect has so that I can deploy an agent on a physical server and just start backing that up to one of our Briks. It can technically be done now but the Brik has to be able to talk to the server directly, so a direct path or VPN is required.

Nope

Nope

Customer service is top notch, which I am usually pretty disappointed in. So far it's the best I've seen for a tech company. Their service is far beyond my expectations.

We used Veeam and switched because of ease of use and time savings.

Initial Setup was simple.  I think the box took longer to mount in the rack than it did to setup.  

Rubrik came onsite for our initial deployment.  Subsequent installs we've done ourselves.  

Rubrik is an expensive product, more expensive than most.  However, the larger the environment you have, the quicker you will see savings in man hours.  We rarely have to touch our backup environment anymore as its so well designed, managed and automated.

We did not look elsewhere because Veeam was already at the top of the list.

If you can afford this product, I fully recommend it. You will not look back.

We use this solution for IaaS customer environment backup in cloud and for internal purposes. We're planning on offering a GUI to the customers so that they'll be able to restore by themselves.

• Time dedicated to backup was drastically reduced.
• Reduced infrastructure complexity, and easy and fast to restore.

• Disk mount that lets a restore happen immediately, no need to re-hydrate.
• A reduced infrastructure complexity and fast to rack and go.

• Integration with video CD (coming in the next release) and a multi-tenant GUI.
  
• Availability in a NFR format of virtual appliances to test them in public cloud environment.

No issues, integration between hardware and software makes it very stable.

Not at all, it's built to be scalable.

Any of the few customer issues were promptly solved by the support. We had internal training through videos offered on their site.

We used Commvault and Acronis and we switched, the first because of complexity, the second because of unreliability.

Very simple and assisted by their engineers on site.

We bought it directly from Rubrik, whose support is praiseworthy.

Since it was fast to rack and go, ROI is highly positive, and customer response was great.

Setup is immediate but pricing is not cheap. The best solution for a small company is to join a provider to backup in the cloud and/or locally with Rubrik Air (BaaS).

We looked at VEEAM (but was based only on a software solution) and Cohesity (similar but less performant).

I'm completely enthusiastic about the product, and I advise it to everyone who needs a fast and easy solution.

We use Rubrik as a secondary recovery method for our Tier 1 applications and the primary recovery method for our Tier 2 and below applications.

The time it takes to manage Rubrik across our entire multi-site environment takes considerably less time that it has taken in the past to manage a single location. With Rubrik's integration into VMware, we don't have to worry about unprotected new servers or changes made to existing servers.

The file search feature across all backups has been helpful. The surprising use has been mounting recent backups to create new servers rather than cloning servers in VMware, which drastically cut down required time.

Troubleshooting failed backups is not what it should be. Once you gather logs, deciphering them without the help of support is usually almost impossible. However, support is great in that regard.

None whatsoever.

The only issue we have run into is the sizing of the Virtual Edge devices. In retrospect, we sized incorrectly and ran into the limits of the virtual device. If we had setup a physical cluster, we would not have had any issues at all.

We used EMC Avamar for many years. Cost and support were key reasons for the switch.

Initially we save several hundred thousand dollars on purchase/licensing. However the true ROI is hard to calculate when you start to look at the quality of the services/support offered.

Within a couple of days of a proof of concept, you'll be convinced that what they have been telling you is true. The sales team was great in putting together a thorough cost comparison.

The scope of our requirements limited the playing field. We did look at solutions like Veeam and Unitrends. However, we settled rather quickly with Rubrik.

A proof of concept will answer all of your questions and sell itself.

We use it to backup our virtual machines, specifically file-based backup and backup of our SQL Database. We also use it to archive data on NFS Share and the cloud.

We are now able to perform fast backups and very quick restores. Now we have a tool to restore a virtual machine with Windows Server 2012 R2 from about 1 TB in around 2 minutes up to login.

The Archive function, which allows you to archive data on the cloud or NFS Share. This allows us to use cheap space in the cloud to archive long-term data, and for short-term data we can use NFS Share.

I think the product is perfect as it is. It does exactly what it is supposed to, backup and restore.

One additional feature that would be nice in one of the next releases would be the integration of MySQL/MariaDB.

No

No, if you need more space you can simply add a node.

Very good support who helps with each question. Very fast response time.

Yes, we used VMProtect but had problems with large Debian virtual machines under VMware. Sometimes the virtual machine got stuck with CPU at 100% after removing the snapshot.
This solution has much better backup and restore times.

Straightforward

Implemented through a in-house team.

One hour for critical virtual machines.

The product is not cheap, but you get really good value for your money. Setup costs are cheap because the product is easy to setup.

Yes we tried Veeam, but we had the same problem with large Debian virtual machines. The performance was not really better.

Everyone who needs fast backup and quick restore should try it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So far, so good.

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

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

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

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

I did everything by myself.

It is hard to tell so far.

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

Veeam was considered, but dismissed.

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

We use Rubrik for daily VM snapshots at local sites, but it is also used for replication in our DR sites because Rubrik has the ability to run a VM on its hardware in case of a failure.

It has greatly simplified our backup process. We create SLAs inside Rubrik, and it does the rest. For most VMs, there is not a Client to be installed. 

We also like the DR features that Rubrik has. E.g., if our main storage goes down, we can temporarily mount VMs on Rubrik.

The user interface (UI) is great. It is very lightweight and intuitive. 

The Auto-Snapshot SLA feature and recovery time are amazing. It took seven seconds to have a server back up and running in production from a total failure.

There are so many things Rubrik has done right. They need to continue to listen to their customers and what they want/need, not just care about money and the bottom line. If they do, they will continue to grow and be a great product.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

We have had training sessions. We used customer support once, and they resolved the issue immediately.

We previously used EMC Avamar. The reason that we switched was cost, maintenance, and customer support.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

We have installed three Rubrik devices so far. The setup took only two to three hours at each site. We were immediately able to start backing up after the initial setup.  

We used Rubrik for the implementation. They let us know what the requirements were for their product to be successfully installed and implemented. We filled out a worksheet with all the configuration settings. The tech came onsite, and it was done in two to three hours.

To be determined.

The cost was less than our previous provider, and this is a much better product.

We looked into EMC's newest product, Veeam, and Cohesity.

If you are looking for a product that offers backups and DR capabilities, which is easy to use, look no further than Rubrik. I am very satisfied.

We use it for backup and recovery of VMware servers, physical Windows servers, SQL Databases, and Microsoft Exchange.

Our previous backup solution was slow, unreliable, and difficult to manage. Rubrik has brought all of our backups under a single pane of glass and made recovery extremely simple.

Instant Recovery of VMs: We had a case where a SQL server had been rendered unusable. Rubrik had us back up and running in seconds.

It is not Windows Cluster-Aware at the moment or Exchange DAG-Aware. If they add support for these particular use cases, it would be even better.

In the event of any issues or questions, the support is top-notch. We rarely need to use support, but when they are needed, they are always quick to respond and very knowledgeable.

We used Backup Exec and Veeam. We made the switch as we found Backup Exec was slow, unreliable, and difficult to manage. Having two solutions was also not ideal, and Rubrik met our needs perfectly. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. 

Rubrik is at the pricier end of the market, but the setup and implementation are so simple that it just works.

We looked at Veeam with ExaGrid and Arcserve.

The primary use case is easy backup and recovery for multiple servers and workstations. It also backups NAS, SQL Servers, and Nutanix.

Rubrik has made the process to manage backup and recovery painless. This frees up more time to work on other projects.

The quick, easy backups and fast restore work great. I also enjoy support calls and the easy updates to the software.

No areas need to be updated at this time.

The addition features that I would like are a way to set monthly backups on a certain date and time. Also, I would like for unmanaged backups to be able to be saved in a separate policy.

Rubrik is being used at my organization for the backups of virtual and physical servers enterprise-wide. I no longer feel the need to babysit and monitor all of the backup jobs in the backup system. It simply works when it is supposed to, at all times. Live recovery is near instant and it handles all mounts through the appliance for rapid recovery. Spinning up test SQL servers from mounts are also great for our development team.

Management is so simple that anyone can check the backups and do restores when necessary.

Instant recovery because it takes about 10 seconds to restore the VM from backup to production, and also mounts from point in time.

It needs more storage array integration options and an easier restore for files that download using a browser.

Rubrik is very simple to implement and setup.  

Our primary use case is vCenter and Nutanix AHV backups.

We are in an international environment which does not provide any backup window, so the SLA way of doing things is amazing.

• Easy, no need to worry about managing backup jobs.
• All based on SLAs.
• Easy to run and learn.
• Nice interface.
• API driver and reporting included.

Adaptative backup and SLAs. They simply allow you to tell a machine to backup without taking care of the backup window. This is a real improvement.

It is already very well furnished, but live mounts for Nutanix AHV would be amazing. From what I understand, however, this will not be soon.

The primary use for Rubrik in our environment is data backup and recovery. Also, Rubrik has a good interface which is simple to navigate and utilize. 

Rubrik has improved our organization by minimizing downtime (in case of an incident was to occur). It also has quick backups helping us to stay current.

The best feature on Rubrik is the interface, as it is easy to use and navigate the program.

For Rubrik, though it does a great job, it needs to keep innovating to stay relevant in the data management field.

Replaces legacy tapes and disk backups which are unreliable, expensive, and space consuming.

It has the ability to test DR in a controlled, inexpensive way and to restore between environments.

CloudOut, because only blocks are pushed after compression and deduplication, not raw sizing which is often a flaw with storage products.

Better integration for complex NAS structures having to mount at root adds time and workload to the process of NDMP.

Rubrik was purchased to replace our aging backup solution. Providing us an 'all-in-one' unit to manage backup, DR, and BC.

Newly onboarded and very impressed. Removes all the headaches of a traditional three-tier backup solution. A little bit of fine tuning needed, but what product does not.

• Single pane of glass interface
• Drives the back-end through a powerful, well-documented API.

Error/fault reporting. When errors do occur, it can be a somewhat painful process to get to the bottom of issues. On the plus side, the support channel is fantastic. This means if you can't find out why, they will and quickly.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

Five star rating: Calls are picked up and managed through constant communication to ensure a speedy resolution.

HPE Backup Servers, Dell EMC Data Domain, and Veeam. 

Whilst this solution was effective, it took considerable management to keep it all working. Rubrik's all-in-one approach removed all the complexity.

Easy install/setup - Literally an hour from the box arriving to ingesting the first data.

Vendor (fantastic knowledge and service) and in-house implementation.

Rubrik is an all inclusive price. No additional implementation costs or licencing.

Yes. Like for like replacement, with consideration of Veeam, Arcserve, Dell EMC Data Domain, NetApp AltaVault, etc.

We are doing a business with Rubrik. I am responsible for implementing the solution to our customers. Even though I am not trained for implementing, it is easy to use and easy to learn. We also get backups for our own environment. 

We had some VMware issue as VMware did some changes on the AHCI drivers. Rubrik saved our environment those times.

• Instant recovery
• Live mount

The open source database needs to be supported.

There are no issues with the stability. 

The solution is scalable to multiple petabytes. Since we do not have that much data, the one which we are using is enough.

10 out of 10.

I used to use Veeam.

The initial setup was straightforward. There is a bootstrap script, which does all the IP address initialization. for all the metadata disk preparation and service openings. 

We did the implementation by ourselves because the deployment and using it is straightforward. 

I cannot provide that information. 

The setup cost is a bit high, but the solution is an all-in-one solution. There is no licensing in terms of capacity. The TCO is lower if you buy it for two or three years. 

We used Veeam before.

It is a great product. 

Rubrik has allowed our Managed Backup product to be elevated from a home-brewed concoction of free backup products wrapped in our special "glue" to a modern, intelligent, single-pane-of-glass orchestration engine. We are no longer embarrassed to explain how our backup product works!

• Near-zero RTO for VMs
• API-first architecture
• Intelligent agent technology

There are some corner cases where the Rubrik Connector (Agent) still doesn't work for our clients, but Rubrik Engineering listens to our feedback and has been delivering the features that we have been asking for over the last year, so we are confident that they will knock those out soon, as well.

Early on there was an issue with our special "flavor" that caused some instability with the Rubrik nodes, but that was resolved within a couple of months by their engineering team.

No, our biggest Rubrik cluster is 10 briks/20 nodes and we're still growing that pool.

Customer Service:

Very good, almost a 10 out of 10. They are among the very best vendors we've worked with.

Technical Support:

Very good, an eight out of 10.

Yes, we previously used a home-brewed solution that didn't have the scalability that we needed.

Straightforward. The deployment was about 20 questions and 20 minutes, and it was done.

In-house team.

Approximately three years.

Yes, we evaluated Bacula Enterprise, Commvault, Veeam, and EMC Avamar/Data Domain.

Saved tons of man hours on not having to do constant babysitting.

Personally, the scripting portion is my favorite aspect. They have a great PowerShell module and easy mediums to speak to the people who create and enhance them.

The functionality is missing, but they are very receptive to our thoughts and ideas.

We ran into a few issues with physical Briks and EDGE Appliances crashing, but they were all resolved by either settings, tweaks, or hotfixes.

No issues with scalability. We have added two Briks to our environment with success.

Customer Service:

A 10 out of 10.

Technical Support:

A 10 out of 10.

We used a combination of Veeam and Micro Focus Data Protector (was HPDP). The scalability of those two products was lacking, and it took a lot of man hours to babysit the products.

The initial setup was straightforward. The bootstrapping process was right to the point and direct.

In-house.

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

We had a PoC between Veeam/HPDP, Cohesity, and Rubrik. Rubrik won out.

Rubrik backup is more than twice as fast as our previous solution. Also, its deduplication rate is significantly better.

• One platform for instant recovery
• Search
• Development
• Cloud

Rubrik can only leverage cloud storage for archiving and has no cloud failover.

None to date. It just works.

No. Rubrik is easily scalable when it comes to both capacity and performance.

Excellent and speedy, too.

Yes, Asigra. Switched due to cost, near zero recovery times, and the fact that VMDK restores constantly failed.

Literally racked, powered on, and all done in 30 minutes. I just needed my Vcenter details.

It’s simple, straightforward, and we were able to see 50% hard savings.

Commvault, Arcserve, and Datto.

See past the immaturity of the product. This will improve RPO/RTOs and save you a lot of time and money.

There have been many changes to how our organization has been able to approach backup and recovery thanks to Rubrik. We have been able to reduce the time for recovery, which is invaluable because it not only frees up our time to move on to other things, but it truly makes our customers feel that they are important and given “special treatment.” Typically, with the previous solutions we were using, it was owned fully by our engineering team, but we were able to train our admin team to take over all operational aspects of the product in less than two hours via a web conference thanks to the no-nonsense and easy-to-use product.

This has also become our go-to solution for disaster recovery requirements for many of our applications. The great part is we don’t have to build out DR VMs to sit there and do nothing, instead, we can deploy a snapshot from production at the time of need instead. This not only saves the customer money, but it saves on bloat in our virtual environment.

First, lets start with what is Rubrik?

Rubrik Cloud Data Management is a single, software fabric that manages all application data in the cloud, at the edge, or on-premises for many use cases, including backup, recovery, archival, analytics, development, and cloud. Rubrik takes the complexity of maintaining and managing your data and enables you to focus on other aspects of the business. The bottomline is if you have Rubrik, you have peace of mind.

It’s hard to pick out a few features to list, but I will start with these:

• Instant recovery: This has dramatically reduced our time to restore from over 20-30 minutes for a server to be recovered and back up and running, to less than 60 seconds. It’s a beautiful thing.
• The search functionality is second to none as the speed of the search is fast across the whole system and predictive.
• I also love the fact that I can apply an SLA domain to various areas (direct to VM, folder, cluster, etc.). I currently apply most SLA domains directly to a cluster so that we have a set-it-and-forget-it approach. When a new VM is added to that cluster, we KNOW that it is going to inherit the SLA domain and be backed up.
• Lastly, Rubrik’s support team is phenomenal. Any time that we have had questions, issues or feature requests, the team responds rapidly and keeps you apprised of the progress without you having to follow-up all the time.

We have put in a feature request against their physical agent. Currently, the physical server agent will only back up folder structures and not truly give you the ability to restore to a bare-metal box. Well, we would love to see the physical agent have the ability to essentially P2V machines from the backup. This would be huge!

It would assist in so many areas of our virtualization projects and especially during a DR scenario. If I could take a snapshot from a physical and be able to stand it up as a virtual immediately without the need to rebuild an entire system and restoring files, that would be HUGE. It would also give us the ability to get away from physical hardware, in general, when we go through to clean up older physical boxes that are no longer under service contract or need to be segregated for any reason.

For instance, we have an initiative to get all 2003 physical servers left in our environment to a segregated cluster and we do use P2V to get them, so bypassing the P2V and just restoring a backup would speed that process up tremendously.

I have not encountered any instabilities with the product outside of limitations on the back end with our AD user object size. We have so many users that Rubrik has an issue handling so many objects, so it makes it difficult to use the RBAC features that were just released in the Firefly/3.0 code release. That being said, Rubrik support has been phenomenal working on this issue with the engineering team and we look forward to their solution very soon.

Scalability has been a great process, as we have gone through a few at this point. Rubrik handles everything. They will come onsite, upgrade the units, ensure all is working properly and it typically only takes a couple of hours. That being said, we have deployments in multiple locations and they do not currently have a management hub that allows you to manage multiple clusters from a single place. You have to go cluster to cluster to make changes.

Rubrik’s technical support has been phenomenal! They are extremely quick to respond and 99% of the time, they are able to take care of everything behind the scenes via the Support Tunnel. They not only respond to emails almost instantaneously, they will contact us about potential issues before they happen.

They have been extremely easy to understand on the phone and encourage you to write in, even with simple questions and feature requests. That has been huge, too: feature requests. We have put in numerous feature requests that were coded in amazing time, not that every feature request has come to fruition, but most have been at least put on the roadmap if they made sense globally.

We used many different products before going to Rubrik, including Tivoli and SnapManager, Nutanix Protection Domains, NetBackup, etc. They were all cumbersome and typically a pain to not only set up, but to recover from as well. By switching to Rubrik, we have been able to simplify many aspects of our backup and recovery procedures.

On top of that, we were able to gain back valuable space on our Nutanix clusters, as we were finding in some instances that snapshots were taking up 50% of the available datastores, which we all know, with Nutanix, is NOT cheap. By switching, we were able to gain that space back for VM deployments instead of having to buy additional blocks as the constraint with Nutanix has typically always been the space, not the CPU and memory.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward as Rubrik sends a field engineer out to handle everything. This goes for expansions as well. We had our initial two sites from the PoC stood up in less than two hours per site. The only reason it wasn’t faster was due to how locked down our network is. Other products we stood up at the same time took far longer to set up, and I mean one was two weeks before we could use it.

I would say that the biggest thing to keep in mind about the pricing, as it may be more expensive than other products you are looking at, is keep the operational ease in mind. Most of the other products we looked at would take far more time to manage, train and just in general use! So, when we compared the overall costs, Rubrik was cheaper because the engineering and operational side required FAR LESS dedication. So, all in all, they actually were cheaper than the competition.

We looked at many other products, including our existing solutions and products like Veeam and Cohesity. First off, Rubrik had the upper hand for the initial interest based on this... We have all gone through meetings to vet a new product of interest. During these meetings, you ask questions and get a lot of, “Oh, no one has ever asked that before” or “Let me get back to you on that,” whereas the Rubrik team had an answer for EVERY one of our questions, right then and there. That is a pretty rare thing in and of itself. That was a huge factor but obviously, the simplicity during the demo was a huge eye-catcher.

I would highly recommend this product to ANY company who is concerned about their backup and recovery processes as well as DR scenarios. This product will simplify your life beyond belief. Not only that, you will be able to give the recovery process over to anyone, even if they don’t have a background in backup and recovery solutions.

The fact that the product is so well thought out in its simplicity for end users, makes it easy to worry less about whether or not it’s doing its job. You will have much higher confidence that you will actually be able to recover the system you are working with, instead of, “I hope it’s been backed up properly.” It will change the way you view your data, especially if you are looking for an effective and simple way to handle disaster recovery.

I have given this product a perfect rating for multiple reasons. The simplicity and ease of use are hands down better than any product we compared during the same PoC period. We have never had an issue with our system on the software or hardware side, other than an issue with the amount of objects their back end will handle for AD user authentication.

Global (Google Like) Search - This allows us to instantly search for servers and files whether they are hosted on the local Rubrik appliance, replicated to another Rubrik appliance or in the long-term storage tier.

Instant Mount - This provides us with the ability to perform instant restores within seconds and whats best is it can be scripted. Restores enable fast invocation of DR, DR testing and Test/Dev.

Replication - Replicate to another brik to enable DRaaS. This is excellent for our customers as it removes the need for a secondary DR data centre and all the associated costs such as hardware, connectivity, management and licensing.

Cloud Archive (Cloudian, S3, NFS) - This long-term storage tier ensures unlimited data retention can be achieved without the need for tape. This scale-out architecture keeps costs low and allows geographical separate for DR/compliance.

Speed of deployment - Setup takes 30 minutes then configuration is performed through a simple UI.

Automation - Create Local SLA domains and automate ongoing protection.

Cost reduction - Automation, scale-out architecture, central monitoring and BaaS/DRaaS in one solution all help to reduce TCO.

Since my last report we now have physical support for Linux and Windows. Hyper-V is coming very soon. We are confident by the end of 2017 that Rubrik won't have any gaps in their support matrix compared to their competition.

Over 1 year. The solution is already excellent and is improving rapidly. Rubrik are eating up the competitors customer base.

No. Its easy and quick.

No. Reliability is very good with Rubrik mainly due to the serious investment in the core technology.

No. Add a brik and scale indefinitely. Scale-out to the cloud provides no fork lift upgrades and unlimited data retention.

10/10. Never seen support like it.

The best of the best. Rubrik's investment in quality staff really shows.

Asigra. Old tech, dated code, poor with virtual environments. Zerto, great product for DR but only works on virtual and you can't keep history (journal) for long.

Easy. Plug and play.

We are a 100% Rubrik centric partner. We provide BaaS and DRaaS for enterprises worldwide with Capex and Opex budgets.

It converges backup and DR into one product so is good value for money. If you need to pay for this on a monthly model then this is achievable through Assured Data Protection.

It has a quick setup and then it is hands-off. It’s a backup product, and you want to set it up and forget about it. For the VMware side, you can set up policies by resource pools, clusters, and folders. This helps with the "set up and forget" process. They have added physical servers (Windows and Linux), plus SQL. This is a huge plus as everything can be managed under one policy.

VM backups are common and there are a lot of vendors. The thing that sets Rubrik apart is the instant recovery feature. While other vendors have this, the storage is on you. In my case, this storage was always on a cheap disk. With Rubrik, you get an array that can support high workloads until you have a main window from which you can migrate the VM back to production storage.

Replication is also great. With one click of a button, you can replicate between Rubrik devices and public cloud storage.

The reporting can be vague, especially when something is failing. AD integration is cumbersome. For highly compliant environments, Rubrik does not patch the IPMI firmware on a regular basis. Be aware that you should design the roll-out with this in mind. Otherwise, your security teams will be calling about vulnerabilities that they can reach.

We have used this solution for over two years.

There have not been any stability issues.

There have not been any scalability issues. This is one of the pluses and a driver for buying Rubrik. If you need backups to run faster, or if you need more storage, you just add another node or Brik.

The technical support is good. They will escalate quickly if it is needed.

We had other solutions before this one. We used Veeam and VMware backups. We left Veeam due to storage management. VMware backups were not as feature rich as Veeam or Rubrik.

The installation is straightforward. You fill out the sheet with names and IPs, and Rubrik sets it all up. However, it does use a lot of network ports, at least one 10-gigabit and one 1-gigabit port per node. That adds up quickly with multiple Briks that can have four nodes each.

Make sure you create different networks and segmentation. The IPMI 1-gigabit networks need to be locked down and not allow other networks to be routed to them.

Understand what you really need to backup. Do you need a backup, or can you use storage snaps? Run their PoC trial. It will give you a good idea of what your compression will look like and it will allow you to estimate the size you need.

We used Veeam and VMware before. We also looked at Commvault.

Understand what you want to backup. Rubrik makes it very easy to go in and back up everything, but that might not be in your budget.

The most valuable feature of this product is fast recovery from the backup. Fast recovery is managed by attaching a disk where the backup is located. It's immediately available to the customer who doesn't need to wait for the system to recover the BKP from an archive.

The traditional backup solutions didn't allow us to give a prompt answer to customers who needed recovery. Plus, there were too many human resources involved for management.

Some of the areas that need improvement are the user GUI (multi-tenancy) and the promised Rubrik Edge solution, which will allow customers to back up their physical devices in our cloud. About the GUI, the interface for our customers is not available at the moment in a multi-tenant environment.

I have used this solution for around ten months.

We encountered an anomaly in freeing up space after archiving but the resolution from support has been satisfactory and fast.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. This is the best scalable backup device that we found in the market.

The level of technical support is very high in terms of the availability, skills and low time to solve issues.

Previously, we have used Commvault. It was a nice solution and also effective in deduplication. However, the license renewal costs were similar to 1 box of Rubrik.

We have also used Acronis, but it's not an enterprise-class product and the several issues that we encountered have not been solved by their support. We still use it because of the customer interface and BaaS.

It's been fast. It took about one hour and was installed for free by a Rubrik field engineer. It is important to note that they have no offices in Italy, so they came from Netherlands for installation.

Licensing is included in the HW. Pricing is adequate for CSP; however, it might be a bit too high for small companies.

We evaluated other traditional SW products; more or less, we looked at all of them.

If a fast recovery and scalability are critical points, then this is the best choice.

It is important to note that it's an HW solution, so all the CPU, RAM and other resources are completely dedicated to backup.