Lee Merrill, a Senior Technical Support Engineer at Rubrik, was formerly a customer of Rubrik. In this blog post, Lee shares his experience and what he learned while evaluating Rubrik from an end user’s perspective.
How did you hear about Rubrik when you were a customer?
I had an excellent experience as a Rubrik customer. We had some pretty significant pain points with backup and had been mainly looking at storage to ease our pain. Disk space was our major issue with backups, so we had to remove backups to keep things going. This was a constant pain and consumed a lot of time. A vendor of ours had heard about “this product” that we should check out. He thought it would solve our backup issues. Afterwards, we had our hands on our first Brik.
Describe your experience when installing Rubrik
A memory I have with Rubrik is setting it up with Eric. After we ingested one small 50GB VM, I thought we should put our file servers to the test. Thus, 4-5TB VMs were next. At first, these had a couple of issues with ingestion, but some of it was due to us only having 1GB nics. Support and engineering were very responsive and started looking into it almost immediately once it was recognized as a problem. The issue was resolved quickly, and the rest of our POC went very smoothly. I was the driving force for us to go with Rubrik. Without a doubt, it was a great choice. We ended up with 3 Briks with two replicating to one.
How was your relationship with support?
Support has always been top-notch. Every time we need assistance we got a scheduled time and mostly, a prompt answer. It was very educational on both sides for us and support. The times that engineering was pulled in were also impressive. It was recommended that we talk with the UI team to give some customer feedback, and that was also very pleasant.
Why join Rubrik?
It was really not a tough decision. I had been looking for a change and getting to see the quality of personnel and the amazing product was a major pull. Rubrik’s future success in the backup space was very clear. I have used many different backup products throughout my career and knew this will be a successful product. I am very blessed to be given the opportunity.
How will being a former end-user impact your role as support?
I think one of the biggest impacts will be that I have been on the customer’s side. I am able to sympathize with the customer’s and sales engineer’s point of view. If the customer is wanting something that is coming in a future version, I can explain some of my past experiences on wanting some feature and how fast it was added or why maybe it wasn’t. Another advantage is the ability to express my love for the product by being a customer and now as an employee as well as comparisons of other products I have used in the past. All of these aspects help build rapport and a good relationship with the customer.
Ultimately, I understand what it is like to be overworked with a million tasks that change all the time. I understand what it means when support taking the cases all the way to resolution without passing the blame on another vendor. It is nice when there’s that kind of support for a product – the support you get from Rubrik support.