Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP is an international law firm that handles some of the largest and most complex commercial and financial matters. Evans Vogas, Network Operations Analyst, at Davies discusses how the company revamped their infrastructure to reduce costs, streamline their IT, and move to public cloud.

How does IT impact your business?
Our lawyers are very client focused. That means our IT infrastructure must be reliably available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If there is catastrophic failure, they need to recover quickly. With Rubrik, we can ensure that. Secondly, we are working on our ISO 27001 certification, which mandates procedures, especially related to disaster recovery. With Rubrik, we can accommodate some of those policies. With encryption at rest, we can protect sensitive data.

Tell me about your environment
We have 600 employees across three offices in Toronto, Montréal, and New York. Our environment consists of approximately 500 VMs and is 97% virtualized. We are protecting 38 TB of data with Rubrik.

What challenges were you experiencing with your legacy solution?
Our previous backup solution was no longer meeting our SLAs. As our data storage grew, backups were taking longer than the allocated backup window. Secondly, data replication was inadequate in our previous solution. On occasion, it would cause a backlog and require manual cleanup. Lastly, it was not as easy to setup and manage, especially archival to the public cloud. You had to be a rocket scientist! As our backup dissatisfaction increased, it didn’t make sense to invest more money into a legacy approach when there were better solutions in the market, such as Rubrik. Now backup is simple!

How are you using Rubrik?
We are using Rubrik for backup, disaster recovery, replication, public cloud archival, and test/dev across our virtual, physical, and remote environments. Use cases include:

  1. Disaster recovery: The best part of Rubrik is that you reduce your RPO. We have restored a Microsoft Exchange database with Rubrik, and it took minutes. The Google-like file restores have saved us a lot of time.
  2. Intelligent and easy replication: With Rubrik, replication is only one click. It is intelligent enough to ensure it’s healthy and optimal at all times.
  3. Public cloud archival: We have been looking into public cloud archival for over a year, but the ones we found were complex to set up. One requirement with Rubrik was that it works easily with any public cloud. For us, public cloud is cost effective. Since Rubrik encrypts data sent to the cloud, you are protected.
  4. Test/Dev: If I want to test a database with Rubrik, I bring it up with an instant mount and then remove it when I am done. I don’t have to do it live.
  5. Rubrik for physical SQL: The main value is that Rubrik gives our DBAs more autonomy to restore and test. We can grant RBAC access to our DBA admins to SQL backups, and with a few clicks, they can restore databases themselves.
  6. Rubrik Edge for remote environments: With Edge, I now have a local copy of my backups and can replicate it to my main appliance. Local backups in our remote site allow for much faster restores when needed.

What results have you seen with Rubrik?
Rubrik brought the fun back to backup. With Rubrik we have seen:

  • 50% TCO reduction
  • 7x improvement in data efficiency
  • 91% data center footprint reduction (22U to 2U)
  • Reduced RPOs from 12 hours to minutes
  • Management time reduced to minutes

 

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To learn more about how Davies saved with Rubrik, read the case study.