Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct Reviews

I use Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct as an AI-based backup product. Rubrik recently introduced AI technology into it. We use it to back up all of our workloads. These workloads can be VMware virtual workloads, physical workloads, NAS, databases such as SQL and Oracle, or AWS and Azure workloads. We back up all of these workloads with Rubrik on a day-to-day basis, and we make sure that the data we back up is encrypted. We store and retain the data in an isolated environment so that it is air-gapped and no bad actors can get into it.

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct has a lot of new features compared to other technologies, for example Dell. Dell used to be the king of the data protection market, but over the past few years Rubrik, Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct, and Cohesity have come into the picture and totally dominated the market. For example, the time it takes to back up workloads, such as virtual workloads, is shorter, and the process is easy. With Dell, we used to use proxies. Rubrik offers proxy-less backups, so there is no need to deploy any proxy server in the virtual environment to back up data. That is one of my favorite features. Rubrik is also spending more of its budget on Rubrik AI nowadays. They are still working on it, but I like the concept of what they are doing. They want to develop Rubrik AI so that users can ask it questions and it will answer all of their queries. That is also one of my favorite features in Rubrik. Restores are also pretty fast compared to other tools, and they are very simple, requiring just one or two clicks. Even inexperienced people can understand it. If we bring in a fresher or someone with two or three years of experience and train them, they can easily adapt to the technology. That is what I like about Rubrik.

Data deduplication is pretty good. Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct uses inline deduplication, and the compression and deduplication are pretty good. The software itself has the feature, but it is also part of the price model. It is an inbuilt feature. With this feature, the main benefit is that backups are faster, and NAS backups are much faster. That is the main concept of Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct: to make NAS backups faster. Compared to the traditional way of doing backups, Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct gives us a faster way of doing both backups and restores. That is the main concept behind it.

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is good. It is pretty user-friendly, and I do not think it requires any improvements in that area. We can simply configure NAS backups by using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct. There is an option called NAS Cloud Direct in RSC, which is Rubrik Security Cloud. When we go to the inventory drop-down in RSC, we see the NAS Cloud Direct option. From there, we launch the app or the wizard. Once the wizard is launched, we give the credentials of the NAS in the cloud, which can be in either AWS or Azure. We give the credentials of the NAS system. If it is a NetApp system, we give the ID and password for the vserver or the NetApp cluster name. Once we do that, the NAS gets mapped through RSC. We are not deploying anything in the cloud, so there is no need for extra servers and no extra pricing. We just map the whole NAS system to the existing RSC and start backing up. That is how the Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct feature works. With the traditional approach, we have to deploy a NAS cluster, which is a virtual cluster, in the cloud and back up through it. That might require more effort and time, and that is how Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct differs from the traditional approach.

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct integrates well with other services. We simply map to RSC, so it is pretty flexible and compatible with all other services. It is not a big deal, and we have never encountered any issues mapping it to different services. We use NetApp and Dell, and both are pretty flexible. We did not have any issues using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct with them. Those are the two services we have mapped with Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct so far.

Not only Rubrik, but all backup technologies are Incremental Forever now. There are two concepts, full backup and incremental backup. Any backup that we take for the first time is called the full backup, and it takes much longer. For example, if I back up a server or a laptop that holds around 100GB, the first backup might take a couple of hours, but the second backup might take only five minutes. That difference is called Incremental Forever. It only backs up the changes since the full backup. The system retains the first full copy, and from then on it only backs up the changes, which are called incrementals. That is pretty good, and it is how all backups work nowadays. It is easy, more flexible, more compatible, and very easy to manage.

Rubrik is one of the leading technologies in the market, but we still have legacy technologies such as NetBackup, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, and Dell Avamar. Rubrik probably needs to overtake all of these tools so that it can do well in the market.

For example, one roadblock is that sometimes the page hangs. The Rubrik UI, and specifically RSC, gets hung. RSC, which stands for Rubrik Security Cloud, is a centralized tool where we manage all of our backups. Sometimes the user interface hangs, or we have a hard time interacting between the user interfaces within RSC. When this happens, we need to reach out to customer service. That is one of the areas where I ask the Rubrik vendor to improve.

Rubrik also needs to ingest more workloads down the line. For example, NetBackup can back up around 120 workloads, and I do not think Rubrik can do that. Rubrik needs to ingest more workloads so that we can back up most of what we need. Customers might come up with something new day to day, and we have many thousands of tools and applications right now that need to be backed up. That is how we can declare any tool an enterprise technology. I do not think Rubrik has fully matured yet. It is only seven, eight, or maybe 10 years old, not 20 or 30 years old.

For example, Cohesity did something smart. They recently bought NetBackup, and Cohesity is the biggest competitor of Rubrik. Cohesity bought NetBackup so that it could ingest all of its features and improve its market position. I do not think Rubrik has bought anyone recently, and that is something they need to try in a smart way so that they can have more features.

I have used Rubrik for maybe more than five years now.

Stability is good, but it is a computer, not a human, and even a computer can make mistakes. Even AI makes mistakes. If I use ChatGPT, it gives me the wrong information 30% of the time, and it even declares by itself that it could be wrong. Rubrik is a relatively small product, so it can make mistakes, which is not a big deal. However, they need some improvements in that area.

Regarding performance issues, as I mentioned, RSC sometimes hangs. That is one of the issues I have encountered in my experience, possibly because of load. We have to call support. Sometimes all the workloads disappear. When we open the RSC UI, we do not see anything in there. We have to call them to ask what is going on, and they have to bring everything back. We have encountered these silly issues a few times. Overall, performance is good, but they have to improve in a few areas.

I contacted them. I opened a ticket and also called them.

Support is pretty good, but sometimes we have longer wait times when I call because they might be talking to different customers. When I open a ticket, they jump on it quickly and help us. Sometimes it is time-consuming, though, and they need to improve that part as well. I think they need to hire more professional engineers. Sometimes one engineer is assigned more cases and is involved with different customers and different cases, so we sometimes get a delayed response. The engineer might also be working in parallel with multiple teams and customers, so he needs to focus on other work as well. That is the area where they need to improve.

Support is good. I can give it an eight.

Rubrik is an appliance, not a simple server. With simple software such as Word, you can install it by yourself by reading the steps and following the procedures, but this is not like that. The customer cannot do the initial setup alone, and we need help from Rubrik because of the hardware part. Rubrik ships the hardware to us initially. Once it arrives at the data center, our data center team racks and stacks it. After that is done, the Rubrik engineering team or their site engineers come into the picture and do pretty much all of the remaining work. The customer cannot do the initial setup themselves and needs help from Rubrik for the hardware part.

For the virtual edition or the cloud edition, we can deploy it ourselves with simple steps and simple software. When it comes to the hardware, however, setting up the initial hardware and all of the networking and cabling requires help from multiple people. The customer cannot do it by themselves.

Pricing is costly. Rubrik is a hyperscale platform, which means the software and the hardware all run on the same platform, so the pricing is a little high. They should probably provide more discounts to customers who are willing to use Rubrik. Right now, the price is based on how much data we protect, and that is one of the licenses we have. It is also based on the number of servers or on the amount of data we protect on a day-to-day basis. That needs to be improved a little bit.

Maintenance is required. We check the regular alerts, and if we get any hardware alerts, we need to clear them from our side on a regular basis. The alerts also go to the Rubrik vendor. From our side, it is low maintenance compared to other tools, and the maintenance is not that high. We just check the alerts, and that is it. If there are any hardware failures, the hardware gets replaced. Apart from that, I do not think there is any other maintenance, and what there is is basic. Only once in three or four years do we do a whole replacement of the hardware. That is a big maintenance task, but it mainly comes after three or four years, once the hardware license has expired or we need to replace the whole hardware. The regular maintenance activities are basic and not that high.

Overall, I cannot say ten out of ten, but I can give it an eight, somewhere between 7.5 and eight.

My main use case for Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is that we have a different set of workloads. Our entire M365 is backed up using Rubrik. All our servers go to Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct. A couple of Windows file sets also, volumes as well. Basically, we are backing up our entire Nutanix infrastructure.

I can give you a quick specific example of how I use Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct in my day-to-day work: every day, any new user that is added to our government tenant, Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct backs it up to the cloud. Everything happening on our infrastructure is backed up to Rubrik. So everything that happens in the day, we leverage Rubrik. When an account is deleted as well, we leverage Rubrik for recovery purposes.

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is our single point of truth when it comes to recovery and our daily appliance usage for the government. As a government entity, we need to make sure every piece of data is not lost. We use it every day.

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct has positively impacted my organization. I have been using it for nine months and it has been the holy grail for our county because we basically rely on it every day for off-boarding, on-boarding, accounts being purged, and we are able to bring them back to life. We are able to attach old mailboxes to users. We are able to detach mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint, and basically everything. It has been such a winning member of the team.

When I started using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct in February when I joined the county, I have seen outcomes where our security score was around 86. We were able to push it to 91 percent right now. We are still doing better by pushing it to 96, probably by the end of the year, pushing it to 97 or 98. So there are a whole lot of metrics to speak for it. Our downtime has been really reduced. We are not afraid of accounts being deleted and wondering when we are able to bring them back. As long as it is needed, we are easily almost always able to recover because we have Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct.

The best features Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct offers include the fact that I do not have to manually manage everything. I just need to set my SLAs and have them work, set the time and then let those jobs run and then I will just come back on the following day just to confirm that nothing failed and they were all able to back up. Automation is very important to me with Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct.

The automation specifically saves me a ton of time and reduces my workload as a lot of the processes have been automated. We install all the file sets, we have our orchestrated recovery setup in place. We also have all our accounts that are moved from active to deleted automatically. Rubrik's automation takes care of it and moves it to relic and applies an SLA to it. It keeps it more like a cold storage.

I would also add that the other part is the fact that I am able to upgrade my CDM on the fly. I download the CDM version that is compatible with my current version, just click on upgrade, and I upgrade with no downtime. Anytime there is an upgrade, there is no downtime.

One way Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct can be improved is the interface is fine and everything looks good. However, I think we should be able to do more at the kernel level, I mean the CDM level, the CLI level. I am very heavy in CLI, so I would want more of the features to push into the commands as part of the CLI.

The other thing I want to add is that the documentation is kind of vague sometimes. I skim through a lot of documents, but I always end up doing things my own way. I would really want the team to improve on the documentation with a lot of screenshots and go-throughs. So far, it has been okay.

If I could change or improve one thing about Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct, the features so far are okay for now.

I have been using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct for a little over seven or eight months. I took over in January.

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is very, very stable. Out of 10, I give it 9.5. It is really stable. There have been only a few times where we have a bit of an issue with authentication, but even that was resolved in less than five to 10 minutes.

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct's scalability is pretty easy and pretty simple. You buy a new one and you put it on, and you run a few commands, you add those nodes, and you are good to go. It is pretty simple and straightforward.

The customer support for Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is beautiful customer support. It is really beautiful for me. I have been working with Rubrik for eight months and the customer support is amazing. It is really amazing. I would rate the customer support on a scale of one to 10 as nine.

Before using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct, we previously used VMware vCenter and switched to Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct because of the obsolete nature of VMware. It was not giving us a lot of leverage. Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct gave us all in one.

I have seen a return on investment with Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct. A lot of time is saved, fewer employees are needed, and we do not have to stay in the office all night when there is a disaster.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that I do not make a lot of those decisions, but I think setup cost is a bit on the high side. Regarding licensing, I do not have specific information, but the setup cost appears elevated.

Before choosing Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct, we did not evaluate other options. We went straight to Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct.

On a scale of one to 10, I rate Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct overall as eight out of 10.

I rate it an 8 out of 10 because I do not see any product that is perfect. It is the reason why every now and then updates are rolled out. When the documentation is fixed and there are a few more chances to give to admins to do things at the back end, I will give it a 10.

Regarding Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct's AI capabilities, we use the AI capabilities for our YARA rules and hash files. I am for a more stringent governance approach rather than leaving it to people to decide.

I think the accuracy and reliability of output for Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct are good as I see features on our dashboard most of the time. I think they are accurate and pretty accurate.

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is deployed in my organization as on-premises. Ours is on-premises and under the government tenant.

The advice I would give to others looking into using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is that it is going to save a ton of money. A ton of processes will be streamlined into one. Workflows are streamlined into a very simple, easy-to-use approach with case studies or use cases.

Approximately 25 users in a big team manage the backups with Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct.

A best feature of Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct would be the security part which comes along with the Rubrik operating system for the backups. Backups are secure.

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct provides seamless integration with other Rubrik services.

It helps with data management as it has a very good set of rich features for this.

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct has improved my organization with secured backups, and even in case of attacks, we are safe with respect to the backup data we have. That is what we have achieved with Rubrik.

I am not sure about areas for improvement.

In terms of stability, Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is still not stable as it is evolving, so I would give it a seven or eight.

Stability can be improved because there are too many changes happening across the world and the vendor is trying to keep up.

The reason I give it an eight is that it is still evolving. There are many features which are still being added to the software and there is more scope for improvements. It does provide features, but there are many other tools which are more capable than this. However, the vendor is still building them. So maybe in a matter of a few years, they will be coming in at one. Maybe we can give it a nine or ten at that time.

I have been using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct for three years.

From one to ten, I rate technical support for Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct as nine.

I am a partner with the vendor, and we did implement the solution for the client.

Regarding the pricing of Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct, I am not sure because there is a separate team who is working on the cost.

Compared to other solutions, Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is a better one. It comes in as maybe top two with the features it provides.

My experience with the intuitive interface of Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is that it is easy to use.

It is intuitive and straightforward with no issues.

We do have the automated tiering and archiving processes features in Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct for the long term.

My experience with Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is that it is good. I rate this product eight overall.