Searching for files in seconds, validating backup jobs, and more importantly, taking vacation. Jaime Huizar, Senior Architect at Power Integrations, talks about the benefits of adopting Rubrik early on.
How did you become an Infrastructure Architect?
I’ve always loved technology and tinkering with things. As a kid, I was fascinated by computers – taking them apart, putting them back together. Working in IT was a natural path to do what I love: test-driving and using the latest technologies. I’ve been in the business for 20 years.
What does Power Integrations do?
We’re a semiconductor manufacturing company that specializes in conversion from AC to DC, and vice versa. We can be found anywhere from a cell phone charger to a locomotive to a windmill.
Tell me more about how your team supports Power Integrations?
Our charter is to keep operations running 24/7 around the world. Any PI (Power Integrations) employee needs to be able to access information any time of the day globally. For us, that means keeping a pulse on the latest technology trends. For example, we were an early adopter of virtualization and started using VMware in 2007. Any technology that can give our business a competitive advantage and can make our lives easier, I’m all ears.
What was wrong with your backup infrastructure?
Backup is the last thing I want to do… but it’s a critical piece to the business. Everything about backup is just complicated. In my 20 years, I’ve gone through most of the backup software vendors in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. It took us almost 60 days to get our last backup software solution running, even though we paid for professional services help. Once it’s running, it’s so complicated that you need a PhD to understand how to make it work. Then you rinse and repeat for implementing backup storage. Backup and recovery just quickly grows into this huge monster that sits there idle. We also did not have the ability to do a quick check on restore – was the backup job successful?!
Why Rubrik?
I’ve been investigating the value of hyperconvergence and saw the value of applying this concept to our backup and recovery environment. I was floored by the simplicity, from the slim form factor to setup to backing up VMs. The setup process took 10 minutes – we gave it a few IPs, the nodes auto-discover each other, and we were discovering files soon after. My exact words to the Rubrik team – “The future is inside this box.”
What’s your favorite feature of Rubrik?
Search. It used to take me three days to do a file search, now it only takes seconds. I type in my query, and the search bar is already auto-populating with suggested results. Once I locate the file, I can select multiple versions and do a quick download. The level of granular control takes the pain of backup away.
The UI is pretty intuitive. Everything you need to know is housed in 7 panels. Our team can quickly pick up how to use and manage the product without any training classes. I’ve been working with the team to refine the UI – that’s the benefit of being an early adopter.
What type of results have you seen after using Rubrik?
In terms of recovery, we now have the confidence that recovery will work since we can quickly test our snapshots by directly mounting them on Rubrik. That means we eliminate the unnecessary transfer of data from our backup storage to our primary environment. Backup on Rubrik, and run on Rubrik. Our RTO is now down to minutes, even seconds. Hard savings – right off the bat, we reduced our acquisition spend by 3x since we avoided purchasing unnecessary hardware and software licensing. If you factor in administrative savings, this just goes up over time.
At a personal level, it’s freed up my time to spend working on more strategic projects. This is also the first year that I can go on vacation.
Watch the video: Power Integrations Achieves Near-Zero RTO.