Jason Klein, CTO at Leeward Business Advisors, spends his time hunting for the latest disruptive enterprise technology to transform business outcomes. An IT architect trained in economics, he’s racked up almost two decades of enterprise tech experience.
Tell me about Leeward Business Advisors and how it differentiates from other service providers?
We’re a Midwest managed service provider that delivers CTO/CIO-level consulting services for all types of organizations, from non-profits with 5-10 users to departments within large, Fortune 100 customers. We take a business-centric approach that focuses on aligning business leadership with technology leadership. We accomplish this by engaging C-level executives to help prioritize business initiatives and outcomes that can be translated to the technology teams. We then offer services that accelerate those outcomes.
How were you solving the data protection challenge prior to Rubrik?
Our previous vendor didn’t provide us with any competitive advantage. The product works fine but didn’t fit into our overall service provider approach. We were looking for webscale solutions that could deliver linear scalability and mitigate single points of failure. We ended up hitting some performance and scalability issues with our previous solution.
I’ve seen customers switch from X to Y to Z, trying to find a better way to slice bread, but all of those solutions do the same thing in the same way. Rubrik is completely different.
How has Rubrik shifted the growth curve for Leeward?
We can manage the entire software/hardware stack through one web-based portal. Our previous solution required us to manage three different interfaces at all times. Adding new customers is significantly easier since we can manage through the SLA policy approach. We create the appropriate SLA policy that then starts immediately protecting customer data.
We’re able to use lower-cost storage tiers, such as object stores or cloud storage, in a smarter fashion. For example, we’re able to index the data that we offload to public cloud or our object store. We can intelligently search and extract data when needed vs. restoring the entire data set. This unlocks more cost-effective archival services for our customers.
Also, the time to take a snapshot has decreased by 70%. After the initial full backup completes the incremental backups moving forward complete, on average, in less than a minute. Performance is significantly better – backups are disruptive to primary storage so the quicker that we can initiate and complete the backup, the better.
What have your TCO savings been like?
Using Rubrik allows us to increase our TCO savings over time as we scale our infrastructure and customer base. While our upfront costs have been higher, we’re able to achieve a more consistent ROI over time with Rubrik’s linear scale and performance. We’re not hitting any hard limitations on scale as we did previously. Our opex savings have increased with Rubrik’s management simplicity.
Learn more: