Alastair Stuart, Infrastructure Services Manager, Sanitarium Health & Wellbeing, keeps an eye out for innovative, best of breed solutions. With more than 21 years of experience in IT, Alastair explains how Rubrik saved his team from tedious backup job scheduling and unlocked new data management use cases. 

What type of struggles did you have with backup?

We’re always looking for ways to do more with less. Our backup infrastructure required a lot of management, from configuring to fine-tuning our hardware and software stacks for optimal performance. We were dealing with troublesome issues such as tape handling difficulties, complexity of configuring several data repositories, and inefficiencies of deduplication across multiple depositories.

What happened after you put Rubrik in place?

Our previous backup solution required us to spend hours on tediously scheduling backup jobs. Rubrik provided a new level of management simplicity that took 20% of a system administrator’s time spent on backup down to 1%. We can easily automate workflows to our business service level agreements. The time savings we received are now directed towards investigating advanced technologies.

Second, we were observing massive inefficiencies when storing our data to disk with multiple repositories. Rubrik rectified this issue by providing us with one single, scale-out repository.

Third, Rubrik provides a search engine that is a game-changer. Our data is highly searchable now. With our other backup solution, in order to locate the data, you had to know the exact backup job. Today, we type in a few letters and can access the file or application we need instantly.

You mentioned that the Sanitarium DBAs have been impressed with Rubrik. Why is that?

We use Rubrik to accelerate our test/dev processes. The ability to instantly live mount our backups and run it off the appliance has been game-changing for our DBAs. For example, if we’re going to upgrade our ERP system, our DBAs have to spend time building a server from the ground up. It’s a labor-intensive process. With Rubrik, we can stand it up, test, stand it down within five minutes.

What plans does Sanitarium have for Rubrik in the future?

We’re looking to add more appliances to support business growth, provide protection at our remote and branch offices, and start managing our remaining physical systems with Rubrik.

Download the case study: Sanitarium Health and Wellbeing Uses Rubrik to Deliver Scale-out Savings