NWS Holdings Limited, headquartered in Hong Kong, is an infrastructure and service flagship of New World Development Company. The company has businesses and investments in Hong Kong and Mainland China with a diverse portfolio that includes toll roads, environmental management, aviation projects, healthcare services, construction, and public transport. Jacky Po and Benjamin Chan, IT Managers at NWS Holdings, discuss how their team leverages Rubrik for cost-efficiency and improved backup performance.

What is the IT environment at NWS Holdings?
BC: A two-person team supports the entire company’s west office infrastructure and staff. Our environment is 80% virtualized and runs approximately 80 VMs. Our team is primarily focused on achieving reliable data protection and data management agility so that we can scale.

What challenges were you experiencing with data protection?
BC: We previously relied on fragmented multi-point solutions that lacked scalability. Expanding our environment required substantial planning, as well as additive licensing and hardware costs. Our previous vendor also did not support global deduplication, which led to high storage overhead. In addition, backups were complex and time consuming, and required manual scheduling to accommodate expansion.

How has backup and recovery improved with Rubrik?
JP: Rubrik delivers hands-free management through an SLA policy engine. With a few clicks in the dashboard, we can easily set backup and retention policies that align with business SLAs. This helps us accelerate compliance with mandated retention policies in Hong Kong. Instant access to reports help us easily track whether policies were met.

Unlike other solutions, recovery with Rubrik does not require data rehydration. In the event of a disaster, near-zero RTO means that we can recover mission-critical applications and servers within minutes.

What results have you seen?
JP: We have experienced several immediate results, such as:

  • Significantly improved backup performance: Backups are significantly faster than with previous solutions. One of the biggest benefits is scale-out global deduplication. Our deduplication rate has improved by 50% with Rubrik, leading to increased storage efficiency and cost savings.
  • Scale-out architecture with hard savings: With Rubrik, we have achieved immediate hard savings with a single license. We no longer worry about costs incurred when scaling with multiple point solutions. Rubrik’s scale-out architecture means that growth is simple and cost-effective.
  • 75% reduction in data center footprint: Rubrik delivers all aspects of data management and protection in one easy-to-use platform. From policy-based backups to granular restores to compliance reporting, Rubrik’s capabilities replace the multiple solutions we were using previously.

What’s your favorite feature?
JC: My favorite feature is the global indexed search for instant file access. Rubrik enables quick file-level restores with Google-like search, which we leverage across all environments including Microsoft SQL server.

How do you plan to use Rubrik in the future?
BC: Rubrik recently launched several new capabilities with its Alta release. We are excited to integrate Rubrik with Nutanix to protect our AHV workloads. No other vendor supports this native integration. Another feature we plan on using is tape archival support since the team uses offline backups for enhanced protection against backup corruption. The Alta release affirms Rubrik’s constant innovation and dedication to supporting workloads across all environments. We look forward to growing our infrastructure with Rubrik.

[CASE STUDY] NWS Holdings Limited Leverages Rubrik for Cost Savings and Management Simplicity