Twelve months ago, I saw the value of hyperconvergence when we welcomed Nutanix into our data center. We went from a provider of information technology to a deliverer of operational technology. The time we spent baby-sitting our primary infrastructure was now replaced with time spent propelling the business forward.
While we had streamlined our primary environment by converging compute and storage, we continued to waste resources and time grappling with complexity in our secondary environment. We were using two different backup software solutions, which pointed to a backup storage target, and then running custom scripts in parallel. In early 2015, I joined Rubrik’s Early Access program after Jason found me. On March 11th, Eric arrived at Langs. We got the system setup within 15 minutes. The longest part of the Rubrik installation was unboxing and racking the system.
Restore is What Matters
We’ve been using Rubrik for 83 days now and nothing is as simple as Rubrik. With Rubrik, everything is measured in minutes (even seconds), not hours. Rubrik has restored my confidence in our backup and recovery infrastructure. Anybody in IT will agree with me that backup, by itself, is irrelevant. Restore is what truly matters. However, restoring takes so long that people don’t properly test restores and just keep their fingers crossed that their backup will work when a failure happens. With Rubrik, as long as I’m on the corporate network, I can do a restore from any browser. I used to spend 4 hours and more (even up to a day) to restore an application but Rubrik has cut that down to just a few minutes.
Live Mount is Brilliant
What’s most brilliant about Rubrik is its Live Mount for DevOps. I can mount any copy of data directly on Rubrik. DevOps planning used to take weeks – time spent on coordinating with the team, allocating the right resources, setting up and testing the environment, and ensuring my developers are satisfied with it. Now we’re able to take the real environment, change the plumbing to avoid network clashes, and provision copies of this environment to developers to start using immediately. When my developers are done, I can shut down the environment. This process has transformed my backups from an insurance policy to a living, breathing usable business asset.
Team is Brilliant
My thoughts on the team? I don’t know which is better, the product or the team. In fact, my tolerance for other vendors has shortened. If I buy something from a big box vendor, I don’t know who they are and they don’t know who I am. With Rubrik, I’m dealing with a team who includes me in the development cycle – I can actually help shape that product roadmap. I’ll be at Nutanix NEXT in Miami next week. Rolland and I will be presenting a session on Converging Data Management on June 10 at 10:45 am ET. Two minutes to spare? Watch my story here (and catch some amazing drone footage).