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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I appreciate Rubrik because it stands out compared to other products. One key advantage is its native security features, eliminating the need for third-party tools. This means we don't have to constantly rely on external support for security posture, scanning, or capacity management. With everything built-in, we avoid potential vulnerabilities from third-party patches, making our solution more secure and self-contained.

Rubrik has provided us with peace of mind by offering immutable snapshots and backups, reducing concerns about data encryption. We've successfully restored various systems without issues, even older versions. It allows us to temporarily restore systems in parallel with production, facilitating interaction or file transfer between them, which is particularly useful for setting up test environments.

Regarding disaster recovery, Rubrik, coupled with cloud storage from Wasabi, enhances our capabilities by enabling us to restore to another data center in a different state. While Rubrik may not be ideal for immediate environment restoration, we leverage other technologies like VMware and Nutanix AHV for faster recovery with minimal data loss, ensuring critical systems are up and running within minutes.

One of the ways that Rubrik has improved the way our organization functions is time savings. Coming off of the backup solution we had before, we were spending several hours a week, every day sometimes, dealing with backups that fail. Other issues include trying to make space or deal with an archive target that was offline. We were just spending a lot of time on it.

Being a smaller team, when we spend time just dealing with the backups, that takes away from us being able to work on other projects that support the business growth and support other functions within the organization. With Rubrik, there'll be weeks sometimes that I never log into it. Maybe two, three weeks at a time, I never log into Rubrik because we get email alerts and they have great error handling. If there's an error or something happens, we get an email.

A lot of times, the appliance will take care of itself and then deal with that missed backup, or whatever happened. But that's very rare. It'll go for several months without having an error. A lot of times, the errors are not a Rubrik issue. It's always that Windows did something that caused the backup to fail and Rubrik reruns it, then it works.

Not having to spend any time in the console because we can rely on the alerting and automated reporting has allowed us to focus on other areas of the business and not deal with backups. Essentially, it gives us peace of mind that Rubrik works. It was definitely a change to get used to, not logging in to it. We buy this really cool piece of technology and turns out that we're not in it a whole lot, but that just goes to show Rubrik has a robust solution that we can depend on.

This product has definitely increased productivity because we're not dealing with backups. They work on their own and it does its thing. We made the investment into Rubrik to not have to deal with backups and it delivers on that. This leaves us time to focus on other things because we're not dealing with a backup that failed.

It is difficult to put an exact number on the amount of time that we're saving by using Rubrik, although, with our previous solution, there were weeks where we had to spend several hours dealing with failed backups. On a bad week, it may have been between six and eight hours. On average, by not dealing with backups at all, we are saving several hours a week.

Using the SLA-based policy automation has simplified our data protection operations. We are no longer scheduling backups or trying to figure out availability, or time slots, where we can back up our systems. For example, we don't have to consider things like we've got backups running at 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, or 3:00 AM, and we're trying to find a slot. Instead, the SLA engine that they have is super easy to use and does that job for us.

It was really good for us to move to the SLA-based approach from a traditional backup because we were able to, for business use, cover tasks such as retaining email for one year. In their SLA engine, it's very easy to find that. Another example might be backing up a set of test-SQL servers where we only need 14 days. Through the policy engine, you set what you want the retention to be and it takes care of scheduling and managing those backups.

Once we have them set, they are stable and continue to work because we don't change SLAs often. We define the retention that we need for each app and each service, and then it just works. Overall, the SLA-based approach makes it very easy to achieve your backups.

Luckily, we have not used their ransomware recovery. We've not had any incidents or ransomware where we needed to, but we have tested recovering assets in the event that happens and we've always been able to recover in our test scenarios, in our tabletop exercises. This is the type of feature that you never want to rely on outside of testing because it means that you're having a bad day, so hopefully, we never have to use it. That said, if we do have to, we're confident that it would deliver.

Similar to the case with ransomware, we have been lucky in that we haven't had any major disasters where we had to fully recover anything. In the usual case, where files are lost because something is overwritten, or something gets deleted, it has definitely saved a lot of time with the instant recovery.

Using the predictive file search, we're able to put those files or directories back or roll back a database in a few minutes. It's very quick and has definitely reduced our recovery time. We've not had to do a lot of restores, but when we do have to restore the occasional file or put a database version back, it's very quick and has saved us quite a bit of time from what the old Unitrends system would have looked like.

This product has also saved us time with respect to managing backups. Prior to Rubrik, every day of the week, we were spending an hour or two hours or sometimes longer dealing with backups, and that's now completely gone. There are some times that we go for weeks and don't even log into the appliance because we get the reports and they tell us everything we need. We trust Rubrik because we've had it long enough now that we know that when it says it completed the backup, the backup's there, and if we need it, we can get it back.

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.

It is basically a backup solution, and we use it when we need to. We have had Veeam, IBM TSM, and a couple of other solutions before this. From the business perspective, the users don't see anything different other than submitting a ticket saying that they need something restored.

Our DBAs utilize it as well. They do test environments. They'll pull stuff from the backup system into their testing areas so they can test different scenarios, and so far, they're liking it fairly well, which is completely different from when we utilized Veeam. We basically had to go and do it for them. With this, we were able to offhand different tasks to different departments, and they could do their own tasks. So, it has made it much easier in terms of infrastructure where we can give other departments the ability to perform their own tasks and projects.

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.

This solution gave us more time to work on other tasks. For a lot of issues that come up, we have support look into them and give us direction instead of us spending a lot of time investigating them.

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%.

Rubrik does snapshot backups. We have a virtual machine, which is a production machine. It is a production database server. We take a snapshot of the server to back up in Rubrik. When we need to test a version, or we need to test an application to do Windows patching and other things, we just stand up a virtual machine from the snapshot, put it in our test environment, and use that to test our patching. Everything that we have in production is also there in the test environment. So, when we test the patch, if anything breaks, we know we can't deploy it in production.

It is also useful in case a VM crashes. When a VM gets corrupted or crashes, we can just stand one up from last night's snapshot. We have our VM up in less than five minutes.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The solution reduced the time we spend on recovery testing, and the Live Mount feature greatly helps with that. We can instantly restore required files without needing a traditional recovery, and depending on the type of file, we can have time savings of 50-70%.   

The solution reduced our recovery time by 20-30%; we noticed a gradual difference compared to other tools. 

In terms of overall productivity, we have fewer people working on backup, which significantly improves productivity. 

The backups with Office 365 happen seamlessly, and I can manage all the native Microsoft solutions in a single pane. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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 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.

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

The most 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Rubrik is critical for our organization because it keeps our data safe. It helps us meet all of our POs and TOs.

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.

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.

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.

One of the most valuable features was the ease of expanding the resources. Additionally, it is able to backup the cloud and on-premise.

Rubrik's instant recovery capability has significantly boosted operational efficiency for our customers. It stands out as the only solution that allows us to seamlessly start up around two hundred virtual machines directly from the backup without encountering any issues.

In a bank implementation, we started with ten nodes and easily expanded to 30 as the organization grew. This shows Rubrik's scalability in supporting the organization's increasing needs.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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