Berkeley College is a private higher education institution that provides academic programs in more than 20 career fields. Today, it has more than 8,000 students at its 9 campuses. Leonard De Botton, CIO, and Joseph Pagano, Director of Infrastructure at Berkeley College, talk about how they reduced time spent managing backup, decreased TCO by 33%, and setup data archival to Microsoft Azure with Rubrik.

What challenges were you experiencing with your previous backup solution?
Our previous solution wasn’t built for the cloud era. We were protecting data with old age backup when we had new age virtualized servers. Backup administration was complex and time intensive. For instance, backups could take three days on one server, were unstable, and failures occurred frequently. Additionally, replication was cumbersome and complex, requiring us to manually configure processes. Lastly, tape was highly inefficient, expensive, and time consuming. We were unable to set up public cloud with our old vendor.

Why Rubrik?
We needed more stability and efficiency as well as a solution that could take us to public cloud. We were looking for a solution that could backup in the time frame that we needed. We wanted to backup every 2 hours, but traditional systems could not do that. We chose Rubrik because it was purpose-built for modern IT.

How are you using Rubrik?
We brought Rubrik into our main and colocation production data center and deployed its Cloud Data Management platform for our physical and virtualized environment. We deployed Rubrik for its full suite of use cases, including backup, disaster recovery, replication, cloud archival, and test/dev. Some of the ways we are using Rubrik include:

  • Data archival to Microsoft Azure: Rubrik is a cloud-based technology that delivers redundancy, replication, high availability and data protection. With our previous solution, we were unable to set up public cloud, and tape takes too long. Any failure is a bottleneck, and it affects production. With Rubrik, we could eliminate tape, integrate seamlessly with Azure, and securely mobilize our applications from on-premises to the cloud. Together, Rubrik and Azure helps us decrease costs, stay within our data retention policy, and establish a stronger DR strategy.
  • Replication for DR: Replication with our previous solution was complex. Rubrik is device-based replication, and after we set it up, it is all policy-driven. Now, we can use Rubrik to instantly recover in case of a disaster.
  • Test/dev workflows: Rubrik gives us a lot of tools that we can leverage for our company’s workflow processes. For instance, if someone wants to upgrade an application, we can simply mount a copy from Rubrik, test on it, and shut it down.
  • Physical SQL: Point-in-time backup and restore is a differentiator for Rubrik. Usually, those traditional backups and restores were time and resource intensive. Rubrik has changed the game and made it very simple and stable. We set a policy, and it just works.

What results have you seen?

  • Near-zero RTO (from days to seconds): Restoring is now so simple and fast. We simply right click on the system and within seconds, it’s done. Previously, that would have been a night of work if not two days of work.
  • 33% TCO savings and reduction in management time: With Rubrik, we have immense cost savings from increasing storage efficiency, consolidating tape, servers, and hardware onto one platform, and freeing up time for our employees.
  • Data orchestration to increase cost-effectiveness: Rubrik frees ups our production SAN from doing all the snapshots. Rubrik has baked in policies that manages the data and sends it the lowest cost storage tier.
  • High performance with Pure Storage and Rubrik: The combination of Pure’s all-flash array with Rubrik has given us unparalleled performance. Now, we have two next-gen applications working together seamlessly thanks to Rubrik.

“As a CIO, I am always looking for products that will streamline our business and deliver speed to provide the best customer experience. With Rubrik’s platform, we can meet these objectives while freeing up our time to use its solution for use cases beyond backup. We have the flexibility to spin up applications on Rubrik in a matter of minutes,” said De Botton.

For more information, check out the case study on Berkeley College.