Aileen Wyer, VP of Technical Support, and Maruf Rahman, Senior System Administrator, recently sat down with us to discuss how our partnership helped to modernize CAN Capital’s legacy backup infrastructure to simplify data management.
Tell me about CAN Capital and your role.
Aileen: CAN Capital has been providing access to working capital to small businesses for over 18 years. I have been with the company for 10 years. In 2016, I moved into tech support and infrastructure management. Our environment at CAN Capital is mostly virtualized with 120 VMs. We have also begun virtualizing our physical servers. We are a small team with only one person dedicated to systems. Having a simple, easy-to-use system is very important to us to reduce the time spent on backup and recovery.
Why were you investigating a new solution for backup and recovery?
Aileen: One of the first things I noticed when moving into this new role is that we had a lot of legacy systems. A big concern was the lack of backups in production. We had a solution that was extremely expensive and could not backup everything we backup now. We were just backing up systems that were crucial instead of all production systems. Legacy systems just didn’t have the capacity that Rubrik would have and cost per TB was too high. Also, the scalability and support was limited. We started working with a technology provider to replace our current system. They presented us with different options, and Rubrik was one of them.
Why did you choose Rubrik?
Aileen: We were looking for a long-term solution. First, we wanted to backup our production servers, then archive to cloud, and lastly, for full disaster recovery. We chose Rubrik because of its ability to scale. The integration with VMware and vSphere is fantastic. Additionally, the option to archive would allow us to free up space. The fast decompression rate was also very appealing. Since we are a small team, we wanted an automated solution with an intuitive interface to speed up the process of backup and recovery. Rubrik gives us the ability to be flexible and grow.
How has your backup and recovery process improved with Rubrik?
Aileen: The ease of use. We are using Rubrik for backup, recovery, and archival. We went from an Excel spreadsheet of all our servers with a yes or no column to whether they were backed up to an automated, single system. Previously, we got a lot of alerts when something failed, and we wouldn’t know why. Due to our auditing requirements, it was important to remediate those issues quickly. We see those a lot less now, and it is less time consuming.
What results have you seen?
Maruf: We went from completely legacy, tape-based backup to Rubrik, a twenty-first century backup. It is now much faster to backup and restore. It is very quick to restore entire VMs, and search has always been fantastic. Now, I spend approximately one-third of the time I used to on backup, freeing up my time to work on other projects. By setting up SLA policies, backups get done every time they should be. It also reduced our data center footprint by 67%.
What’s your favorite feature?
Maruf: The UI. The interface itself is really intuitive. Even if you have no backup experience, you can pick it up right away. I also love the live mount feature.
What is your plan for the future with Rubrik?
Aileen: We are going for a fully virtualized environment. We also predict a lot of savings with cloud archival. The same is true with DR. With Rubrik, we want to replace all of our legacy infrastructure.
Learn more about Rubrik’s approach to backup and recovery in our data sheet.