Based in Boulder, Colorado, Sphero designs and develops robots that fuse physical robots, digital apps, and entertainment experiences. Founded in 2010, the company helped pioneer connected play with its smartphone-enabled spherical robots that encourage learning through play. Since the launch of their iconic BB-8 droid, Sphero has created robotic toys for some of the largest entertainment brands in the world, including Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar while also engaging kids worldwide with their presence in over 20,000 schools. We recently spoke with JD Snodgrass, IT Manager, who oversees all IT services at Sphero.

Tell us about Sphero’s IT strategy.
My team and I support and manage all end-user systems for the company, including networking, servers, AV, and help desk. Sphero is dedicated to providing employees with innovative technology to help serve its global customer base. As a result, ensuring always-on services is a top priority for my team.

What issues were you experiencing with your legacy backup solution?
Previously, we only relied on network storage devices and disk. We had no physical backups and no disaster recovery plan. Upon joining the company, I knew we needed more robust data protection. On top of that, we had an incident that caused part of our building to collapse. Thankfully, no one was hurt, and our systems were not adversely affected, but it was a wake up call that we needed a better backup solution.

What excited you about Rubrik?
A key feature for us was Rubrik’s Nutanix AHV integration. We’re big fans of Nutanix’s hyper-converged, scale-out platform and are currently migrating to Nutanix AHV. Rubrik has simplified this process through its native support for AHV backup and recovery.

Why did you ultimately choose Rubrik as your data management solution?
Rubrik provides end-to-end data management for Nutanix, which means that we can access data instantly, automate protection policies, and manage our AHV workloads. We trust Nutanix and Rubrik to protect our mission-critical applications. As a small team, we prefer solutions that can solve complex tasks while also being simple enough for any of us to use. Rubrik was a perfect fit.

What other benefits have you seen?

  • Data archival to AWS S3: When evaluating new solutions, migrating to the cloud was a top priority for the team. Unlike our previous vendor, Rubrik allowed us to enjoy the scalability and cost savings of the public cloud by easily archiving to AWS S3.
  • Simple all-in-one data management: Rubrik requires almost no onboarding and can be used by anyone on the team. This is extremely important since we are a lean IT team and must be able to wear multiple hats. Rubrik simplified our entire data management strategy through a consumer-grade interface that allows us to monitor our whole system with a single pane of glass.
  • Granular restores with Google-like search: We recently had to perform an important restore at the file level, which was easy to execute with Rubrik’s search capabilities. The entire task took under 15 minutes.
  • Reliable and automated backups: Previously, we didn’t have a full-featured data protection solution, and there was no guarantee that our data was truly being backed up. With Rubrik’s policy-driven approach, we have automated backups across our entire environment. Now, we’re only spending a few minutes per week monitoring our backups, freeing up my team to work on more innovative and valuable projects.
  • Fast recovery in the event of a disaster: Rubrik has helped us strengthen our DR strategy. The solution delivers instant data access and recovery capabilities, which enables us to quickly restore our production sites at any time.

Interested in learning more? Read the case study.