JE Dunn Construction has been a leader in the commercial construction industry since 1924, providing construction management services, design-build, and integrated project delivery. Headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, JE Dunn has 21 offices nationwide and over 2,500 employees. It is the 11th largest domestic general building contractor in the United States, generating over $2.9 billion in revenue in 2017 alone. We recently spoke with Jason Hull, Senior Systems Manager, about their experience with Rubrik.
Tell us about JE Dunn’s IT strategy. What is the IT team responsible for?
IT is tightly integrated with our business strategy. Our IT team provides trusted, innovative technologies that enable our executive management, project teams and clients to advance transformational business solutions.
My team that is responsible for data protection and data center operations, supporting 2,500 employees and over 50,000 accounts. We empower lean processes at our construction sites with technology, enabling our teams and partners to be more collaborative and productive. On top of that, we’re committed to providing stability, availability and performance. Rubrik is a crucial part of achieving that strategy.
What challenges were you previously having with data protection?
As we begun to evaluate new vendors, we wanted a solution that was disrupting the backup and recovery industry. Rubrik was our unanimous choice. It was evident in choosing Rubrik that we’d be gaining more than just backup and recovery. We’d also be enabling orchestration and automation, in addition to providing a high level of resiliency in the event of data loss or a disaster.
Why did you end up choosing Rubrik?
One of our key drivers in choosing Rubrik was its API-first architecture. It was a perfect fit for our automation-centric approach. We are currently leveraging Rubrik’s APIs to consolidate our executive dashboards into one reporting platform, as well as surfacing business continuity RTO/RPO information for seamless data center operations. On top of that, Rubrik’s API playground was very helpful when our team was generating code for database recovery. These APIs allow our less technical engineers to work with Rubrik and provide even more value to the business.
Tell us about your experience with Rubrik and VMware vSphere.
JE Dunn is looking to fully embrace the ethos of a true software-defined data center (SDDC). VMware has long provided this with vSphere, a hypervisor that disrupted the data center space and continues to innovate every year.
A main concept of SDDC is a true software fabric that can be programmatically controlled. By combining Rubrik’s RESTful APIs with VMware automation, we can systematically apply SLA policies across the data center.
Additionally, JE Dunn is working to enable self-sufficiency across the organization and remove IT as the bottleneck. We can achieve this by allowing developers to automatically spin up live mount copies of VMs for testing and enabling business or VM owners to instantly restore workloads as needed.
What other benefits have you seen with Rubrik?
- 62% TCO savings and 90% management time savings: Our backup administration time went from four hours per week to 20 minutes.
- Easy to install: I’ve never experienced such a simple installation before. Rubrik was installed on a Sunday evening and backing up successfully on Monday morning. The fact that it was up and running in the same day gave us instant gratification.
- 75% reduction in data center footprint: With Rubrik’s software convergence, our data center footprint went from 8U to 2U.
- Significantly reduced recovery times (from hours to minutes): With our previous solution, it could take hours to recover. With Rubrik, we’re able to satisfy most requests in less than 10 minutes. Outside departments are recognizing the solution as an important tool for recovering lost work.
- Cloud mobility: We’re required to store all of our data on premises due to client requirements. However, if we wanted to explore cloud migration in the future, we know Rubrik’s vendor-agnostic integrations with private and public cloud will make that easy for us.
Interested in learning more? Read the case study.