At VMworld 2016, I sat down with one of our customers at a Fortune 500 consumer retail company to discuss how they are using Rubrik and the benefits they have seen. As a result, they have wiped out management complexity for their backup and recovery environment and created a plan to expand their global footprint.

What type of backup challenges were you experiencing?

Our team was looking to simplify backup and recovery. We were previously using multiple solutions and were frustrated by the time needed to train employees let alone recover data. It just wasn’t feasible, and we needed faster recovery times. Additionally, our previous solution was extremely expensive. We have two heavy data centers, and we were running out of runway in our remote locations as well as our local locations. To expand storage space within our former solution would have been very costly.

What sold you on Rubrik?

While we were evaluating other solutions, when we saw your product, it spoke for itself. That was the biggest thing. I don’t think anyone on our team could effectively know how to use our previous product. With Rubrik, I can take anyone off the street, and in less than hour, he can manage his own backups without a problem. We also hadn’t seen the same depth of knowledge of the product from a team in a meeting with anyone else.

How are you using Rubrik?

We use Rubrik to manage our backups, recovery, and archival. For example, we have had a few occasions where we had to recover a folder structure or entire VM. These are customer-facing sites or have critical data on internal customers, and we can’t have those VMs down. With Rubrik, we just need to know what path we are looking for, and Rubrik finds it for us instantly. In less than 60 seconds, we can restore a whole VM. It’s amazing.
We also use Rubrik to archive to object stores with Cleversafe. One of the main reasons we chose Rubrik was that it can ingest from Cleversafe. We simply set a policy to archive everything every 7 days. It works perfectly.

What results have you seen with Rubrik?

  1. Datacenter footprint reduction: We have seen a huge footprint reduction. Usually, we would have full racks and half racks to manage all our data. Now, we have a 4 Brik footprint and 2U to handle all our backups in one major data center. It is amazing!
  2. Lower TCO: Rubrik has already shown its value by allowing us to regain space for storage. It would have been a huge cost if we had to expand storage space with our previous solution.
  3. Management Simplicity: Previously, there was a team of 10 handling backups. Now, there are only a few of us. We went from spending 5-10 hours a week to less than hour. Rubrik’s got it handled, and we can do it simply, quickly, and focus on other engineering tasks that allow us to function better.
  4. Instant Recovery: Ease of recovery is the biggest thing for us. Previously, recovery times were so complex and took at least one hour to restore. With Rubrik, live mount is only 60 seconds, and it drastically reduced our recovery times.

What are your favorite features?

I love how everything is simple. Search functionality is hands down something no one else has in regards to speed, accuracy, and simplicity. Additionally, instant recovery is fantastic. It is completely automatic and as granular as file-level recovery. Lastly, the declarative policy engine is huge. Before Rubrik, we had to implement data stores to break it up into chunks and then sprawled it out to make sure that all backup jobs we completed. This resulted in a very difficult to manage data center. Now, with Rubrik, I can tell the system that I want this cluster to be protected no matter what, and I can protect every single one. Rubrik’s Auto Protect makes it so I can set it and forget it.

How are you planning to use Rubrik in the future?

We are looking at expanding our global footprint next year. We want to start using Rubrik’s virtual appliance for our ROBO offices. We are also looking at our existing data centers and assessing how we can put in more Rubrik appliances. Our main question is, “How do we get this product everywhere?”