Grigoriy Milis is the CTO at RFA (Richard Fleischman & Associates) and a 16-year IT veteran with more than 15 years of experience working in the financial industry.
What differentiates RFA from other Managed Service Providers?
We specialize in providing global data center services to the financial services industry, such as hedge funds and private equity funds. RFA is headquartered in New York City but we operate in New York, Connecticut, Boston, and London.
We do a substantial amount of research in the market to stay on top of the latest technology trends that can help our clients. We’ve established a good track record of partnering up with startup companies to help them shape their product roadmap early on. Many of these companies have now become major players in IT markets like security.
What drove the initial interest in Rubrik?
We actually were very skeptical of evaluating a backup solution given the maturity of the backup market. Backup is an old problem and existing solutions, from decades ago and more recently, are pretty similar across the board.
What caught my attention was Rubrik’s public cloud archival capabilities combined with global deduplication. It’s a huge differentiator for Rubrik since everybody integrates with public cloud providers nowadays but they lack awareness of where the data is located.
If I have to restore from the public cloud, I have to restore the entire data center from the public cloud. Rubrik allows me to bridge the local appliance to the public cloud, and directly bring data back no matter the location. It’s just not data extraction, but granular data extraction regardless of where the data set is stored.
Overall, Rubrik offers us savings and scalability, which are both critical to a MSP. Backup jobs have a high rate of failure, but Rubrik is a lot easier to handle and manipulate. The jobs themselves run a lot cleaner through policy automation. Space savings have been on the order of 5x for the same amount of data that is managed by our 2U Rubrik rackmount appliance.
How have you leveraged Rubrik’s data archival?
Data archival allows us to expand into other geographies and help our existing customers by adding capabilities that we didn’t have before.
We didn’t have long-term data retention, which impeded our client adoption. With Rubrik, we can better serve our clients in the UK. Long-term data retention is an even bigger issue in the UK when compared to the US. You’re required to keep everything for 7 years, and on top of that, record all conversations for another 7 years.
What other services are you providing to Rubrik?
We are delivering backup, replication, and archival for a customer in the European asset management business. The customer maintains a Rubrik appliance on-site and points to us as a replication target.
For us, Rubrik is an investment that continues to pay over time. We’re impressed with the extremely rapid pace of development. Typically, when you work with technology vendors, they’ll present a roadmap for the next 6 months to a year. With Rubrik, new capabilities are being developed on a monthly cadence.