Tim Gable, Network Systems Manager, and Shane Hadden, Senior Network Engineer, at Fujirebio Diagnostics, Inc. discuss how they transitioned to an innovative data management solution to complement their shift to virtualization and public cloud.
Tell me about Fujirebio Diagnostics, Inc. and your role at the company
Fujirebio Diagnostics, Inc. is the world leader in the production of in vitro diagnostics and biomarkers. Our parent company, Fujirebio, Inc., is a leading healthcare company in Japan with offices in China, Sweden, Belgium, and the United States. Shane and I support the infrastructure that compromises our data center at our Pennsylvania location. The IT department as a whole is 14 team members, but the infrastructure team consists of only 2 – Shane and I. Since it is just Shane and I responsible for managing the network, storage, virtualization, backup, and recovery, we needed a system that was simple and easy to operate.
Tell me about your environment
Rubrik supports all systems at our Pennsylvania location with 250 end users as well as at our remote location in Texas with 25 employees. Currently, we have approximately 85 VMs under protection with Rubrik across two sites. Our environment is 100% virtualized, another major shift over the last five years that led us to reevaluate our disaster recovery solution.
What challenges were you experiencing before Rubrik?
About 5 years ago, we deployed a leading legacy vendor, but it wasn’t dependable. Servers would backup one day but not the next. We also had an issue with aging data and it required a lot of manual intervention. One of our biggest challenges was that with our current system, we couldn’t upgrade our system to the next version of VMware software. We were running out of space, and the cost of a forklift upgrade was incredibly expensive. Our objective as a department was to replace our previous solution with innovative, modern technology.
Why Rubrik?
When we realized what Rubrik could do, we began comparing every other vendor to Rubrik. The top two drivers were easy to use and reliable. The all-in-one platform was a differentiator along with the simplicity and elegance of the interface. It was so easy that during a presentation to the IT department, we realized the easiest way to explain Rubrik was to simply sign in to the product. Rubrik is its own presentation.
How are you using Rubik?
We use Rubrik for backup, disaster recovery, and archival. We also use Rubrik for testing. One of our systems was notorious for having updates that could break things and send it to hell. Instead of doing an update with our VMware snapshots, we live mount and run the update on Rubrik to test how it would perform. Once complete, we shut it down and run it in production. This way we know what obstacles we will face and can quickly resolve the problem.
What are the key benefits you have seen with Rubrik?
With Rubrik, we can define our SLA’s not on what our IT can do but to better fit our business. We now look at our business as a whole and set our SLAs by criticality, retention, and backup frequency. Rubrik can accommodate these tighter requirements unlike our previous solution. We went from simple nightly backups to backing up our mission critical data every 2 hours. Additionally, the speed of recovery with Rubrik is phenomenal. Before, that would be an all-day process. Now, it is reduced to minutes.
How does Rubrik further your cloud strategy?
With Rubrik, we have eliminated tape. One of the key reasons we chose Rubrik was because the Amazon AWS integration performs very well – deduplication rate, efficiency, and performance in the cloud is great. We use public cloud for long-term archival and to extend on-site storage capacity. We employ instant archive for all our mission critical production systems, giving us more resiliency in case of a failure.
What TCO improvements have you seen with Rubrik?
We are seeing a 75% reduction in TCO with Rubrik. Licensing and support costs are considerably less than our previous solution. Also, before Rubrik, we would have tapes exported offsite to Iron Mountain on a weekly basis. Rubrik removes the cost of Iron Mountain pickups. Before Rubrik, we spent approximately $300 a month on backup tapes. Now, we save $12,000 a year just by eliminating tape complexity and $32,000 without licensing support. In two years, Rubrik pays for itself.
