As the Director of Sales Engineering at Rubrik, I am privileged to meet many customers across different geographies and all verticals. I witness a variety of challenges, but there are some common themes. One challenge nearly every customer battles is how to effectively manage disaster recovery (DR).
To provide disaster recovery, businesses often utilize several options, including various forms of replication (array based, application based, hypervisor based), DR automation tools (i.e. VMware Site Recovery Manager), and backups. These approaches are typically costly and complex; they require similar hardware at Production and the DR location site, and users must manage multiple tools.
A good DR plan provides multiple layers of protection from a myriad of failure types. This can be accomplished with tools such as snaps, data replication, and data protection.
Rubrik can play a key role in your DR plan. With our solution, customers reduce their RPO to 1 hour and achieve a near-zero RTO. Rubrik leverages components of a modern data center like converged architecture, flash, and deduplication to efficiently replicate data from Brik to Brik and instantly recover VMs. Each Brik provides 30k IOPs, which allows workloads to temporarily run directly from Rubrik until production issues are rectified. The solution also scales linearly, so users aren’t hampered by forklift upgrades.
To better understand how Rubrik provides a comprehensive DR strategy, let’s walk through a few common scenarios that customers experience:
Complete Site Failure
If you are using array, application, or vSphere replication, you could failover to the DR site. This is great for your Tier 1 data but can be costly to protect all data. With Rubrik, instantly recover any VMs that have corrupted during the failover or that aren’t using your Tier 1 replication strategy. You can then use Storage vMotion to move those VMs back into a production datastore.
If you’re using backups only, you may end up rebuilding a backup server and reindexing backups for recovery. This can take hours or days to get up and running. But Rubrik enables instant recovery of any VM with a near-zero RTO.
SAN Failure or Downtime
This never happens, right? Typically, in this scenario, you failover to your DR site or start recovering from your backup environment. With Rubrik, power on VMs directly from your Brik. Instant recovery has them up and running in the time it takes to power on a Windows or Linux machine. That VM then runs on Rubrik until you get your house in order and perform a Storage vMotion to move your data back to production. Again, near-zero RTO.
A VM Blue Screens or Fails
With Rubrik, instantly recover the failed VM. Rubrik will deprecate the VM that is down, power it off, and then power it on based on the snapshot you choose. The VM will be back up very quickly and can run on Rubrik until you are ready to Storage vMotion back onto your production datastore. And, of course, it provides near-zero RTO.
These options can be automated with Rubrik’s RESTful API for an even stronger DR plan. Failover and failback workflows can all be automated, simplifying the entire process.
Rubrik equips customers to conquer any disaster recovery scenario. Whether data is on-prem or in the cloud, Rubrik delivers an easy-to-use solution for even the most complex problems.
Want to learn more about Rubrik for DR? Read the data sheet: Replication for Disaster Recovery.