Misha Vyazmensky, CTO, and Chris Gurley, Sr. Network Engineer, explain how Rubrik helped ExponentHR move forward in its DR strategy.
What does ExponentHR do?
Misha: Since 2001, we’ve been a leading human resource information systems SaaS platform. We help businesses (100 to 10,000+ employees) drive smarter decision-making, from running payroll to accessing vast amounts of data for financial analysis to managing employee benefit plans in light of recent legislative changes like ObamaCare.
Why were you investigating a new solution for backup and replication?
Misha: We have a team of 4 employees. We’re a small group supporting an enterprise-level business so we place a high emphasis on technologies that deliver simplicity and ease of management.
Chris: Before, we were using a virtualization-centric backup solution that had replication capabilities to deliver off-site availability. When it worked, it was fine. When it didn’t work, it was rocket science to root cause the issue. Restores were also click-intensive and time-consuming – it took a hundred clicks and 30 minutes to start restore for just 50 VMs.
Why Rubrik?
Chris: We were two days away from signing paperwork to expand our existing backup system when I saw Duncan Epping’s post on Rubrik. We had looked at several other options but these were more of the same with a minor pro or con. The Rubrik team gave us the demo. Witnessing “Live Mount” – the ability to boot VMs directly on Rubrik without provisioning production storage – was an “a-ha” moment. (Read more on Chris’ original reaction here.)
How are you using Rubrik for replication?
Misha: Since our initial deployment in April, we have added more Rubrik appliances to deliver site-to-site replication for our production environment.
Chris: We use Rubrik to bring replication times much closer to reality. In the past, RPOs ranged from half a day to 2 days. Now we have bi-directional replication. We have mission critical SQL servers that show up at the other site within minutes of being backed up. Our window of data loss has massively shrunk.
What benefits have you seen?
Misha: We’ve become more agile. It’s easy to manage, deploy, maintain, and restoring is a breeze. ExponentHR has grown significantly, and we’re able to manage a growing infrastructure with the same headcount. Even though we initially deployed the product in its pre-mature release, it’s better than anything else on the market.
Chris: We used to deliver RTOs in the range of 6-12 hours, and did not have file-level restore. Now, we can restore a spreadsheet or a database, and we’ve restored an entire VM in just minutes when things go unexpectedly south. Rubrik’s policy-driven nature makes it easy to throw a VM into the policy group and know that it’s getting the protection measures.
Download the case study: ExponentHR Brings Backup and Replication Times Closer to Reality
Watch the video: ExponentHR Builds DR Strategy with Rubrik
Read more from Chris Gurley (The Gurleyman): Replicated Recovery With Rubrik, Instantly Recover with Rubrik, Rubrik Update: Scale & Cloud, and Rubrik Executes in the Field.