Elenia is the second largest electricity distribution company in Finland, supplying household, corporate, and public sector customers in over 100 municipalities throughout Finland. Antti Laakso, IT Specialist at Elenia, discusses how his team leverages Rubrik for time-saving backup management and instant recovery of mission-critical systems.

Tell me about your role and the IT environment at Elenia.
Elenia supplies power and heat to 420,000 residential, industrial, and community customers in Finland. We are leading the smart electricity networks field by integrating power distribution and data systems into a smart electricity distribution grid to provide real-time information.

At Elenia, I am responsible for managing VMware backups and storage. Currently, we protect about 400 VMs with Rubrik in a fully-virtualized environment. An eight-person IT team supports approximately 400 employees, as well as our entire customer base.

What challenges were you experiencing with your previous solution?
Prior to Rubrik, we relied on multiple legacy solutions, which was increasingly complex and time-consuming to manage. If the business wanted tight RTOs and RPOs, it would have been tough to meet them. It could take one day to restore a mission-critical system, which negatively impacted our business.

Additionally, there were times when backups failed or we couldn’t restore from our backups. It wasn’t reliable. The system also did not index data, so we had to know which specific machine a file was on to restore it. If we didn’t know, it was impossible to recover that file.

How does Rubrik help drive business outcomes?
Any downtime directly impacts our business. We must comply with strict government regulation mandating that our systems are running 24/7. Rubrik ensures that in the case of a data center failure, we can instantly recover our systems and keep our business operating continuously. Rubrik is also helping to drive business goals at Elenia. Rubrik allows us to work with the business to determine SLAs, RTOs, and RPOs while giving us the peace of mind that we can successfully meet our objectives.

How does Rubrik impact your disaster recovery strategy?
Rubrik delivers instant recovery for our mission-critical systems. Previously, a single-file restore could take three hours or more. With the legacy software, we had to recover the entire VM before we could restore a single file. Depending on how large the VM was, it could take a whole day. With Rubrik, we simply mount required snapshot directly on Rubrik to deliver a near-zero RTO. This is critical in the event of a disaster. Rubrik gives us the ability to minimize downtime and recover quickly.

What results have you seen with Rubrik?
Our previous solution was very manual. A key benefit of Rubrik is that it automates protection with a consumer-grade interface that is very easy to use. This has greatly reduced the time spent managing backups. We used to spend half a day managing backups. Now, we spend only a few minutes per week.

Rubrik also eliminated multiple legacy solutions with a single software converged solution, reducing our data center footprint by 70 percent. In addition, Rubrik allows us to assign permissions for self-service access, so authorized users can perform restores themselves.

What are your future plans with Rubrik?
In the future, we will deliver Rubrik’s complete data management platform for our physical Microsoft Windows servers and Hyper-V. We also have plans to run customized reports with Rubrik Envision to share operational insights with management and leverage Rubrik’s RESTful APIs to create custom automated workflows. Lastly, one of the reasons we chose Rubrik was because of its seamless integration with cloud. In the future, we want to evaluate public cloud for cost-effective retention and scalability. Rubrik would enable us to migrate our data to public cloud securely, encrypting all data sent to the cloud.

[CASE STUDY] Elenia Delivers Instant Recovery for Business Continuity with Rubrik