Stora Enso, headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, is a leading provider of renewable solutions in packaging, biomaterials, wooden constructions, and paper on global markets. Benny T’Jaeckx, IT System Engineer at Stora Enso, discusses how his team leverages Rubrik at the company’s mill in Langerbrugge, Ghent for policy-driven management across all environments.

Tell me about Stora Enso Langerbrugge and your role.
Stora Enso Langerbrugge is a leading sustainable newsprint and magazine paper manufacturer that produces 540,000 tons of paper annually. My team supports five sales offices and three production units across the UK, Belgium, and France. So, we need a reliable data management solution for both our local and remote offices.

Our environment consists of 189 VMs, as well as several physical SQL servers. Since we support eight locations across three countries, it is imperative that we have visibility into all our data and speed of recovery to ensure operational continuity across all our environments.

What challenges were you facing with your previous solution?
The biggest problem we faced was our lack of a data management solution for our remote environments. We have over seven remote offices and were previously relying on tape for backups. This manual process was complex, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. For instance, adding a new VM required intensive planning with our backup schedules.

Additionally, our previous vendor provided poor backup performance, so the team could only backup once a week. Backups took 48 hours to complete and were unable to meet backup windows. Even more, the whole process required daily monitoring, which drained our resources.

How has Rubrik addressed these challenges?
Rubrik provides a single solution that simplifies our entire data management process. The platform provides policy-driven automation for our VMs, physical SQL servers, and remote office environments.

Previously, managing ROBO environments was cumbersome and unreliable. With Rubrik, we have eliminated tape and are leveraging policy-driven management. This approach diminishes the risk of data loss in the event of a disaster.

Our physical SQL servers required close monitoring due to unreliable backups and failure notifications. In addition to policy-driven automation, Rubrik enables quick recovery with just a few clicks within a consumer-grade interface — no training required.

What results have you seen?

  • 6x improvement in backup performance: One of our biggest pains before Rubrik was lengthy backup windows. A weekly backup would take 48 hours to complete. Now, we backup every VM daily in less than 8 hours.
  • Reduced RTO and file-level restores: The RTO for virtual workloads has reduced to seconds. In addition, our RPO has gone from 1 week to 1 day. For our SQL servers, the RPO has lowered from 1 hour to 5 minutes.
  • Optimized replication policies: Due to storage limitations with our previous vendor, our retention policies were set to 2-3 months and databases were set to 2 weeks. Rubrik provides deduplication between all backups. So, now our retention is set to 2 years while still maintaining runway.

How else has Rubrik improved your day-to-day operations?
As a time-strapped team that serves employees globally, Rubrik’s global predictive search feature has been a game changer. If someone deletes a file, we can easily restore it without knowing which folder it is in.

Rubrik’s built-in reporting ensures that we are immediately alerted of a failure. The team also has plans to leverage Rubrik Envision to create customized reports and help drive business goals.

What are your future plans with Rubrik?
The team is planning on archiving to the cloud. Rubrik’s seamless integration with public cloud was a major deciding factor when evaluating solutions. In combination with the scale-out architecture, Rubrik is the perfect platform to grow with our business needs.

To learn more about how Stora Enso simplified their data management, read the case study.