Rubrik Reviews

There have been many changes to how our organization has been able to approach backup and recovery thanks to Rubrik. We have been able to reduce the time for recovery, which is invaluable because it not only frees up our time to move on to other things, but it truly makes our customers feel that they are important and given “special treatment.” Typically, with the previous solutions we were using, it was owned fully by our engineering team, but we were able to train our admin team to take over all operational aspects of the product in less than two hours via a web conference thanks to the no-nonsense and easy-to-use product.

This has also become our go-to solution for disaster recovery requirements for many of our applications. The great part is we don’t have to build out DR VMs to sit there and do nothing, instead, we can deploy a snapshot from production at the time of need instead. This not only saves the customer money, but it saves on bloat in our virtual environment.

First, lets start with what is Rubrik?

Rubrik Cloud Data Management is a single, software fabric that manages all application data in the cloud, at the edge, or on-premises for many use cases, including backup, recovery, archival, analytics, development, and cloud. Rubrik takes the complexity of maintaining and managing your data and enables you to focus on other aspects of the business. The bottomline is if you have Rubrik, you have peace of mind.

It’s hard to pick out a few features to list, but I will start with these:

• Instant recovery: This has dramatically reduced our time to restore from over 20-30 minutes for a server to be recovered and back up and running, to less than 60 seconds. It’s a beautiful thing.
• The search functionality is second to none as the speed of the search is fast across the whole system and predictive.
• I also love the fact that I can apply an SLA domain to various areas (direct to VM, folder, cluster, etc.). I currently apply most SLA domains directly to a cluster so that we have a set-it-and-forget-it approach. When a new VM is added to that cluster, we KNOW that it is going to inherit the SLA domain and be backed up.
• Lastly, Rubrik’s support team is phenomenal. Any time that we have had questions, issues or feature requests, the team responds rapidly and keeps you apprised of the progress without you having to follow-up all the time.

We have put in a feature request against their physical agent. Currently, the physical server agent will only back up folder structures and not truly give you the ability to restore to a bare-metal box. Well, we would love to see the physical agent have the ability to essentially P2V machines from the backup. This would be huge!

It would assist in so many areas of our virtualization projects and especially during a DR scenario. If I could take a snapshot from a physical and be able to stand it up as a virtual immediately without the need to rebuild an entire system and restoring files, that would be HUGE. It would also give us the ability to get away from physical hardware, in general, when we go through to clean up older physical boxes that are no longer under service contract or need to be segregated for any reason.

For instance, we have an initiative to get all 2003 physical servers left in our environment to a segregated cluster and we do use P2V to get them, so bypassing the P2V and just restoring a backup would speed that process up tremendously.

I have not encountered any instabilities with the product outside of limitations on the back end with our AD user object size. We have so many users that Rubrik has an issue handling so many objects, so it makes it difficult to use the RBAC features that were just released in the Firefly/3.0 code release. That being said, Rubrik support has been phenomenal working on this issue with the engineering team and we look forward to their solution very soon.

Scalability has been a great process, as we have gone through a few at this point. Rubrik handles everything. They will come onsite, upgrade the units, ensure all is working properly and it typically only takes a couple of hours. That being said, we have deployments in multiple locations and they do not currently have a management hub that allows you to manage multiple clusters from a single place. You have to go cluster to cluster to make changes.

Rubrik’s technical support has been phenomenal! They are extremely quick to respond and 99% of the time, they are able to take care of everything behind the scenes via the Support Tunnel. They not only respond to emails almost instantaneously, they will contact us about potential issues before they happen.

They have been extremely easy to understand on the phone and encourage you to write in, even with simple questions and feature requests. That has been huge, too: feature requests. We have put in numerous feature requests that were coded in amazing time, not that every feature request has come to fruition, but most have been at least put on the roadmap if they made sense globally.

We used many different products before going to Rubrik, including Tivoli and SnapManager, Nutanix Protection Domains, NetBackup, etc. They were all cumbersome and typically a pain to not only set up, but to recover from as well. By switching to Rubrik, we have been able to simplify many aspects of our backup and recovery procedures.

On top of that, we were able to gain back valuable space on our Nutanix clusters, as we were finding in some instances that snapshots were taking up 50% of the available datastores, which we all know, with Nutanix, is NOT cheap. By switching, we were able to gain that space back for VM deployments instead of having to buy additional blocks as the constraint with Nutanix has typically always been the space, not the CPU and memory.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward as Rubrik sends a field engineer out to handle everything. This goes for expansions as well. We had our initial two sites from the PoC stood up in less than two hours per site. The only reason it wasn’t faster was due to how locked down our network is. Other products we stood up at the same time took far longer to set up, and I mean one was two weeks before we could use it.

I would say that the biggest thing to keep in mind about the pricing, as it may be more expensive than other products you are looking at, is keep the operational ease in mind. Most of the other products we looked at would take far more time to manage, train and just in general use! So, when we compared the overall costs, Rubrik was cheaper because the engineering and operational side required FAR LESS dedication. So, all in all, they actually were cheaper than the competition.

We looked at many other products, including our existing solutions and products like Veeam and Cohesity. First off, Rubrik had the upper hand for the initial interest based on this... We have all gone through meetings to vet a new product of interest. During these meetings, you ask questions and get a lot of, “Oh, no one has ever asked that before” or “Let me get back to you on that,” whereas the Rubrik team had an answer for EVERY one of our questions, right then and there. That is a pretty rare thing in and of itself. That was a huge factor but obviously, the simplicity during the demo was a huge eye-catcher.

I would highly recommend this product to ANY company who is concerned about their backup and recovery processes as well as DR scenarios. This product will simplify your life beyond belief. Not only that, you will be able to give the recovery process over to anyone, even if they don’t have a background in backup and recovery solutions.

The fact that the product is so well thought out in its simplicity for end users, makes it easy to worry less about whether or not it’s doing its job. You will have much higher confidence that you will actually be able to recover the system you are working with, instead of, “I hope it’s been backed up properly.” It will change the way you view your data, especially if you are looking for an effective and simple way to handle disaster recovery.

I have given this product a perfect rating for multiple reasons. The simplicity and ease of use are hands down better than any product we compared during the same PoC period. We have never had an issue with our system on the software or hardware side, other than an issue with the amount of objects their back end will handle for AD user authentication.

Global (Google Like) Search - This allows us to instantly search for servers and files whether they are hosted on the local Rubrik appliance, replicated to another Rubrik appliance or in the long-term storage tier.

Instant Mount - This provides us with the ability to perform instant restores within seconds and whats best is it can be scripted. Restores enable fast invocation of DR, DR testing and Test/Dev.

Replication - Replicate to another brik to enable DRaaS. This is excellent for our customers as it removes the need for a secondary DR data centre and all the associated costs such as hardware, connectivity, management and licensing.

Cloud Archive (Cloudian, S3, NFS) - This long-term storage tier ensures unlimited data retention can be achieved without the need for tape. This scale-out architecture keeps costs low and allows geographical separate for DR/compliance.

Speed of deployment - Setup takes 30 minutes then configuration is performed through a simple UI.

Automation - Create Local SLA domains and automate ongoing protection.

Cost reduction - Automation, scale-out architecture, central monitoring and BaaS/DRaaS in one solution all help to reduce TCO.

Since my last report we now have physical support for Linux and Windows. Hyper-V is coming very soon. We are confident by the end of 2017 that Rubrik won't have any gaps in their support matrix compared to their competition.

Over 1 year. The solution is already excellent and is improving rapidly. Rubrik are eating up the competitors customer base.

No. Its easy and quick.

No. Reliability is very good with Rubrik mainly due to the serious investment in the core technology.

No. Add a brik and scale indefinitely. Scale-out to the cloud provides no fork lift upgrades and unlimited data retention.

10/10. Never seen support like it.

The best of the best. Rubrik's investment in quality staff really shows.

Asigra. Old tech, dated code, poor with virtual environments. Zerto, great product for DR but only works on virtual and you can't keep history (journal) for long.

Easy. Plug and play.

We are a 100% Rubrik centric partner. We provide BaaS and DRaaS for enterprises worldwide with Capex and Opex budgets.

It converges backup and DR into one product so is good value for money. If you need to pay for this on a monthly model then this is achievable through Assured Data Protection.

It has a quick setup and then it is hands-off. It’s a backup product, and you want to set it up and forget about it. For the VMware side, you can set up policies by resource pools, clusters, and folders. This helps with the "set up and forget" process. They have added physical servers (Windows and Linux), plus SQL. This is a huge plus as everything can be managed under one policy.

VM backups are common and there are a lot of vendors. The thing that sets Rubrik apart is the instant recovery feature. While other vendors have this, the storage is on you. In my case, this storage was always on a cheap disk. With Rubrik, you get an array that can support high workloads until you have a main window from which you can migrate the VM back to production storage.

Replication is also great. With one click of a button, you can replicate between Rubrik devices and public cloud storage.

The reporting can be vague, especially when something is failing. AD integration is cumbersome. For highly compliant environments, Rubrik does not patch the IPMI firmware on a regular basis. Be aware that you should design the roll-out with this in mind. Otherwise, your security teams will be calling about vulnerabilities that they can reach.

We have used this solution for over two years.

There have not been any stability issues.

There have not been any scalability issues. This is one of the pluses and a driver for buying Rubrik. If you need backups to run faster, or if you need more storage, you just add another node or Brik.

The technical support is good. They will escalate quickly if it is needed.

We had other solutions before this one. We used Veeam and VMware backups. We left Veeam due to storage management. VMware backups were not as feature rich as Veeam or Rubrik.

The installation is straightforward. You fill out the sheet with names and IPs, and Rubrik sets it all up. However, it does use a lot of network ports, at least one 10-gigabit and one 1-gigabit port per node. That adds up quickly with multiple Briks that can have four nodes each.

Make sure you create different networks and segmentation. The IPMI 1-gigabit networks need to be locked down and not allow other networks to be routed to them.

Understand what you really need to backup. Do you need a backup, or can you use storage snaps? Run their PoC trial. It will give you a good idea of what your compression will look like and it will allow you to estimate the size you need.

We used Veeam and VMware before. We also looked at Commvault.

Understand what you want to backup. Rubrik makes it very easy to go in and back up everything, but that might not be in your budget.

The most valuable feature of this product is fast recovery from the backup. Fast recovery is managed by attaching a disk where the backup is located. It's immediately available to the customer who doesn't need to wait for the system to recover the BKP from an archive.

The traditional backup solutions didn't allow us to give a prompt answer to customers who needed recovery. Plus, there were too many human resources involved for management.

Some of the areas that need improvement are the user GUI (multi-tenancy) and the promised Rubrik Edge solution, which will allow customers to back up their physical devices in our cloud. About the GUI, the interface for our customers is not available at the moment in a multi-tenant environment.

I have used this solution for around ten months.

We encountered an anomaly in freeing up space after archiving but the resolution from support has been satisfactory and fast.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. This is the best scalable backup device that we found in the market.

The level of technical support is very high in terms of the availability, skills and low time to solve issues.

Previously, we have used Commvault. It was a nice solution and also effective in deduplication. However, the license renewal costs were similar to 1 box of Rubrik.

We have also used Acronis, but it's not an enterprise-class product and the several issues that we encountered have not been solved by their support. We still use it because of the customer interface and BaaS.

It's been fast. It took about one hour and was installed for free by a Rubrik field engineer. It is important to note that they have no offices in Italy, so they came from Netherlands for installation.

Licensing is included in the HW. Pricing is adequate for CSP; however, it might be a bit too high for small companies.

We evaluated other traditional SW products; more or less, we looked at all of them.

If a fast recovery and scalability are critical points, then this is the best choice.

It is important to note that it's an HW solution, so all the CPU, RAM and other resources are completely dedicated to backup.

I am satisfied with the product. The VM recovery and file-level recovery from the VM snapshot are valuable. It supports object storage. It supports S3 buckets. It is a good feature. Instant recovery is a good feature.

The process of adding policies to the dashboard must be improved. It is very easy to add the policies in other solutions. Collecting logs in Rubrik is very difficult compared to other tools. If there’s an issue, it is very difficult to get the logs. The product must support OpenShift Container.

I have been using the solution for more than five years.

The tool is scalable. We have more than 500 employees. We have only two administrators.

The technical support is okay. We do not face many problems. We solve all our issues.

Positive

The deployment was not easy, but it was not complex. The deployment took one day.

We use other solutions for different purposes. We chose Rubrik because it has some good features.

I will recommend the solution to others. It has some features that are not available in other products. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I am a reseller and systems integrator. This is used as a backup solution that already has a hardware appliance associated with it. So you don't need to buy a separate appliance from another vendor since Rubrik would already have hardware that's compatible with its backup software.

I value the options it has for storage tiering (i.e. whether it should be a flash, SSD, or pushed to the cloud) depending on the data provided.

It would be nice if they could work on the pricing a bit.

It is very stable.

It's able to be very scalable, either scaling up or scaling out.

Support is good now that they are done restructuring.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward takes a team of three anywhere from two weeks to a month depending on size.

If clients agree to the relatively higher price point, it is definitely something we recommend, There is a lot of flexibility in how it can be deployed, and where their data can be backed up (i.e. on-premise or in the cloud).

I would rate it an eight out of ten.