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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Before choosing Rubrik, we evaluated other solutions including Dell Avamar, which is their data protection solution. We also looked at Cohesity and with respect to Unitrends, we knew that they were out, so we didn't re-evaluate the product.

The results of our evaluation showed that Rubrik really outperformed the others, with just their support of Hyper-V. They all seem to support Hyper-V to some extent, but Rubrik seemed to have the best support for it at the time.

The speed of Rubrik and the ease of use also stood out, compared to the others.

The Dell solution was very much a traditional backup system and we wanted to get away from that. We wanted to go to something that was cloud-ready for archive and DR. We also wanted a product with great support for virtual machines because that's where our infrastructure was going. We just didn't get that feeling with the Dell solution. I'm sure that it is a great product and they probably sell a lot of it, but it wasn't the new solution we were looking for.

Then with Cohesity, we just didn't see it as a good fit. Overall, Rubrik just looked better and fit our needs better. We had to consider the infrastructure and the workloads we were protecting, as well as the features that we were looking for in terms of the easy backup and the immutable backup protection for ransomware, the CloudOut, and cloud DR technology. It all just was a little bit better in Rubrik and just beat out Cohesity.

We are heavily virtualized and have lots of SQL as well, which is why we picked Rubrik. These are two things that they are very good at.

They're definitely a forward-thinking and future-thinking company in terms of offering their VM backup and their SQL backup, so they really shine over the competitors we looked at.

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 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.

We also looked at Cohesity. The main difference is that Rubrik is more web-based, has a more active customer support model, and is less complex.

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

We evaluated Cohesity. We had NetBackup, but Rubrik was best geared for us because we also have a cloud initiative. So, we needed a solution that we could use to back up on-prem and to the cloud. We wanted to be able to swap virtual machines from on-prem. We wanted to take an on-prem virtual machine and stand it up in the cloud. Rubrik had exactly what we needed. One of the main features that helped us make our decision was ransomware detection.

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.

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.

Veeam was considered, but dismissed.

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.

We evaluated Veeam and are considering looking at it again, as the virtualization is better, and Rubrik has some issues with Azure.

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.

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 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.

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

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

Veeam, Avamar, and Cohesity.

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.

We evaluated other options before, such as Cohesity. We choose Rubrik because it was overall a better solution.

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

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.

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

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

We thought about Veeam.

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

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

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

NetBackup, Veeam and Cohesity

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

We use other solutions for different purposes. We chose Rubrik because it has some good features.

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

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

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.

We looked at Veeam with ExaGrid and Arcserve.

We used Veeam before.

Commvault, Arcserve, and Datto.