Rubrik Reviews

Our primary use case is to back up our physical and virtual environments. The solution is deployed both on-prem and in the cloud. 

We use Rubrik to protect virtual, physical, and cloud-native environments.

The types of systems and applications protected by the solution include VMs, SQL, NOS servers, and Office 365. 

The solution reduced the time we spend on recovery testing, and the Live Mount feature greatly helps with that. We can instantly restore required files without needing a traditional recovery, and depending on the type of file, we can have time savings of 50-70%.   

The solution reduced our recovery time by 20-30%; we noticed a gradual difference compared to other tools. 

In terms of overall productivity, we have fewer people working on backup, which significantly improves productivity. 

The backups with Office 365 happen seamlessly, and I can manage all the native Microsoft solutions in a single pane. 

The Live Mount feature is excellent; it's useful for the backup administrator and end user.

The SLA-based policy automation is very effective in cloud archiving, as we have archives in the cloud.

Regarding the solution's archival functionality, there is a Hot and Cold Tier concept, a handy feature we can implement within Rubrik. 

We used the solution's Polaris, SaaS-based framework for extracting metadata, and the compliance and governance are excellent, especially during audits.  

I want to see more features regarding filtering in the Snapshot Window, as I need to be able to set a filter for specific dates and times. If I want to check an old backup, I must scroll through one or two years of backups to find what I'm looking for.

The reporting is another area with room for improvement; it needs to be more detailed and have more options for customization. Nowadays, reporting is primarily automated, so I'd like to see the same from Rubrik.

I've been using Rubrik for three years. 

Native Rubrik is stable, but we have struggled a lot with stability in our recently installed cloud-based instance of the solution.

The solution is scalable, and it's straightforward to scale. We have around ten users, including database and server administrators, plus security staff. Most users have read-only access, and a few have write access too.

The technical support in India is excellent; they are quick to respond and resolve issues.

Positive

I previously used Commvault and EMC NetWorker. We switched because Rubrik is more affordable and user-friendly.

The initial setup was straightforward, and it took approximately one hour to get up and running. There are many background steps to take regarding network configuration. I carried out the deployment and perform the maintenance for the solution by myself. 

With this kind of product, we get an ROI when a problem occurs, but we haven't faced any outages or ransomware. The recovery and backups are there, but thankfully, we haven't encountered a situation where we needed them. 

We use Rubrik Go, the provider's evergreen subscription purchasing program, and it's affordable. 

There are additional costs for add-ons, and they recently upgraded a new cluster, which also carries a price.

We evaluated Veeam and are considering looking at it again, as the virtualization is better, and Rubrik has some issues with Azure.

I rate Rubrik nine out of ten. 

I highly recommend the solution as it's very user-friendly and easy to work with out-of-the-box; there's nothing complex about it.

We have yet to integrate Rubrik with other solutions, but we plan to integrate it with vCenter.

The solution didn't save us time on managing backups as such, but the UI is very user friendly.

We do not use the solution's ransomware recovery. 

I have yet to learn if Rubrik reduces downtime because we haven't faced that issue. Whenever I did a test restore, it happened so quickly that we didn't really have downtime.

My clients primarily use it for for backing up enterprise workloads like VMs, databases, and other enterprise products.

I work for an IT service company. I design solutions for our customers and use many Rubrik services, including Rubrik Cloud Vault, Office 365 protection, and data center protection. So, I design and implement, and my team supports the solutions.

Rubrik is an important tool for data recovery in case of a ransomware attack. It's a crucial part of their overall venture, as data recovery would be difficult without it.

The guarantee of data restoration in a crisis is the main benefit.

It's a combination of all features that offer value, like ransomware remediation and sensitive data discovery, that are better than other solutions.

Rubrik is emerging with its AI capabilities. Rubrik's AI companion is called Ruby which is very useful. 

For data security, anomaly detection, site monitoring, and threat hunting are very important features that help customers.

Rubrik offers extensive automation capabilities. Usage varies depending on the customer. We create automation for testing, recovery scenarios, and other testing scenarios.

The only disadvantage is the price due to the extensive features.

I'd like to see a cloud backup service for smaller customer environments that may not support a physical or virtual appliance.

I have been working with Rubrik for three years.

It's very stable.

It's incredibly scalable. The size of the environment varies greatly depending on the customer. Some have two or three people, while others have thirty to forty peple.

The customer service and support are good.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy and not complex at all.

Deployment process:

We plan, design, and track everything. If it's in a data center, racking and cabling are done. Then, we integrate with VMware, the application manager, and deploy the VMs. 

If it's a public cloud, it's a similar process, but we have to submit changes to the organization.

Deployment time:

It depends, but in a data center, we can be up and running in one to four weeks.

We have multiple customers, so we work with different versions. 

For deployment resources, we usually need two people with minimal support from the data center for facilities, network, and security.

We haven't calculated the exact ROI, but it is a bit higher. Sometimes, customers hesitate initially due to the cost.

It is expensive.

I would recommend using it. 

Identify your specific feature requirements, compare different Rubrik versions (Foundation, Business, Enterprise), and carefully consider sizing to avoid overbuying.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for backups. We transitioned from Veeam to Rubrik, and we currently have on-premises backups for production and disaster recovery purposes. These backups are clustered between both sites, with 60 appliances used for backup operations.

Rubrik simplifies our data backup and recovery processes significantly. It's very straightforward to use. We start by tagging through VMware, and everything tagged for Rubrik is backed up automatically. Backups are much better and faster because Rubrik takes a full snapshot of the virtual machine. We recently conducted a verification by performing a restore, and even during the restore process, we could bring up the server in less than 10-15 minutes. Additionally, we have set up alerts for sensitive data, which helps us track data. 

We have set up all the alerts for sensitive data. It's not exactly data governance fully, but it does help us to identify those data. The tool helps us to avoid vulnerabilities and any cyber protection issues. For example, if any antivirus or other security measures are on the system, Rubrik flags it immediately, indicating that a backup and an air gap are required. This ensures that no other backups would be impacted if there's an issue with one backup. Additionally, Rubrik comes with live monitoring capabilities, allowing its support team to identify and address any issues immediately. 

The tool's most valuable features are the management of sensitive data, the air gap backup functionality, and the real-time monitoring capabilities. Additionally, the speed and reliability of the platform are also highly beneficial.

Instant recovery with Rubrik has significantly improved our RTOs. The process is much quicker than traditional backups, allowing us to restore backups with minimal downtime.

I hope to see enhancements in areas like data governance and the incorporation of new features in future updates.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the stability of Rubrik as a ten. It meets our requirements and has become our primary backup solution.

The solution is scalable. 

We faced no significant challenges while integrating Rubrik with our IT infrastructure. Their support team was excellent and assisted in the deployment process. Even after deployment, their responsiveness to tickets was impressive, addressing any issues promptly.

Positive

I rate the product's deployment an eight out of ten. 

I rate the tool's pricing a six out of ten. 

We found that Rubrik offered a comprehensive solution with a single appliance that met all our needs without requiring additional services or infrastructure. Other solutions often involved purchasing separate storage, servers, and proxy servers, which could be costly. In terms of cost, while Rubrik initially seemed more expensive, the overall cost was more favorable compared to the multiple components required by other solutions. 

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

We're using the solution for backing up email to file servers and for Oracle backups.

The solution's technical support team is very responsive and proactive.

I don't like Rubrik's user interface because it's not intuitive, and I find it hard to get the information I need. Rubrik is an expensive solution, and its pricing could be improved. There are issues with the compatibility between Oracle and Rubrik.

I have been using Rubrik for one year.

I rate Rubrik an eight out of ten for stability.

Since we're using Rubrik for backups, we don't have users logged into it. The solution is used by our IT support team, which has six to seven users.

I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution's technical support team is very responsive and proactive.

Positive

We previously used Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).

The solution's initial setup is easy enough, and we paid for a Rubrik expert to install it for us. It was easy in most systems, but there were ongoing issues with the Oracle backups.

The solution's deployment could take a week or so. However, the deployment took a few months for us because of the compatibility issues between Oracle and Rubrik.

Rubrik is an expensive solution.

Rubrik is deployed on-premises in our organization. We're also doing a total backup to the cloud. It's backed up to our main data center, where we have a Rubrik cluster. That Rubrik cluster is replicated to the Rubrik cluster in our DR center. From there, we do a total backup to an archive out to the cloud. So, we have a mixture of everything going on.

If users are buying Rubrik to back up their Oracle database, I suggest they speak to a customer who has implemented Rubrik with Oracle. They should investigate and ensure they understand what they're buying before proceeding.

Overall, I rate Rubrik a five out of ten.

We primarily use Rubrik to back up and restore our VMware VMs and our Microsoft SQL databases and also to perform long-term archival.

Compared to other enterprise backup restore solutions, it is really easy to start using Rubrik to perform a backup and restore. The solution's interface is really intuitive.

For Microsoft SQL databases, Rubrik allows to perform a live mount of a database backup. Instead of doing the whole tedious restore procedure to get an older copy of the database back, you can also mount the database directly to the database from the backup storage. You will have a read-only copy on the backup server, which you can use to retrieve your old data.

Rubrik is a very scalable and high-performing backup restore solution. We can back up a large number of databases and also restore them with a very good backup restore performance.

Rubrik's disaster recovery capabilities could be improved. If you are using Rubrik and want to use it to do a quick and easy restoration of a site if one data center goes down, some small improvements can be made there.

I have been using Rubrik for four to five years.

Rubrik is a very stable solution, and we hardly have any issues with it.

Rubrik is a very scalable solution. The DBA and the server admin team, comprising approximately 15 employees, use the solution in our organization.

I rate Rubrik a nine out of ten for scalability.

We contacted the technical support team for some technical questions, and the experience was very positive. They follow up quickly on our support cases, and we get the technical expertise we seek. If we are looking for a particular feature that is not yet available, they add that requested feature to their backlog to implement it in a newer version of the solution. We are very happy with the technical support for the solution.

I rate Rubrik’s technical support eight and a half out of ten.

Positive

We previously used the latest backup restore capabilities offered by Microsoft SQL Server. We used our custom scripts and methods to perform backups and restores. We switched to Rubrik because we wanted a uniform backup restore solution and more advanced data protection against ransomware attacks. With Rubrik, we can safeguard our data more easily than our old custom backup solution.

With Rubrik, I was not involved in setting up the backup restore solution. From a database administrator's perspective, it is really easy to set it up if you want to configure backups for a database server. You have to install the agent, and then the server pops up in the Rubrik environment as a new server. Then, you can configure your backup configuration and backup policies, and you're good to go.

If you choose Rubrik, you will most likely have a positive experience. You should perform a thorough assessment and comparison to see if Rubrik is indeed the best fit for your environment. In my personal experience, Rubrik is a very good backup solution if you can afford its price.

Overall, I rate Rubrik a nine out of ten.

We back up our virtual infrastructure with it. We have about 400 virtual machines that we back up.

We are using its latest version. We upgraded just recently.

It is basically a backup solution, and we use it when we need to. We have had Veeam, IBM TSM, and a couple of other solutions before this. From the business perspective, the users don't see anything different other than submitting a ticket saying that they need something restored.

Our DBAs utilize it as well. They do test environments. They'll pull stuff from the backup system into their testing areas so they can test different scenarios, and so far, they're liking it fairly well, which is completely different from when we utilized Veeam. We basically had to go and do it for them. With this, we were able to offhand different tasks to different departments, and they could do their own tasks. So, it has made it much easier in terms of infrastructure where we can give other departments the ability to perform their own tasks and projects.

Its reporting is most valuable. I like how it reports that everything is successfully backed up. It provides a summarized report that I can give to auditors and management.

Their documentation can be improved to provide information about how some of the things work.

They should give more access to the backend capabilities. From a customer point of view, you do not have access to all the features on the system. You have to engage their support to perform some of the tasks. It would be helpful for an experienced engineer to be able to go and do some of those tasks prior to contacting the support.

I have been using this solution for about three or four years.

There are no issues on the side of Rubrik itself. Rubrik seems to be very stable, especially when it comes to their physical installs. If it's a physical backup appliance, it works really well.

So far, we've not had any issues at all. We have 16 nodes on one site, and we also have several virtual Rubriks where it's just a single instance. So, we have a range of different configurations, and all of them scale pretty decently.

We have about 10 users who use it directly. Its usage depends on the day. At times, it's heavily used, and at other times, it's not. It's a come and go thing.

We contact their technical support a lot. It is about two times a week, but it's usually where we've gone beyond the norm of what a normal customer utilizes the system for. So far, they have been very responsive, and nine times out of 10, they are able to accomplish the task that we're trying to perform.

We had Veeam before this, and we've also had IBM TSM, Tivoli. We've also used a couple of other solutions out there.

We switched because the cost of Veeam was too much. After 200 core licenses, the support cost was almost the same as buying Rubrik for the first time.

I've been here 13 years, and I actually deployed it. I've deployed five different sites, so we don't have just one. For the most part, it was pretty straightforward. It took about 30 minutes.

The first time, we used a consultant from Rubrik, and after that, we did it ourselves. Our experience with them was exceptional. It was really good.

I don't remember the cost, but I know that for Veeam, we were spending almost $250,000 a year for 205 licenses. It was an enterprise version. When we purchased Rubrik, it was just a little bit more. It was not a terribly huge amount, and if I recall, that was for three years of support as well. So, Veeam priced itself out of the market at a certain point in time.

In terms of additional costs, there are some add-ons that they have built. Since the time we purchased it, there have been different cloud offerings. When you purchase the appliance or Rubrik basic services, you get all services. As far I'm aware, you don't necessarily have to purchase extra things. They don't nickel and dime you.

I would advise others to do a PoC, test it, and see how well it works. They should compare it to some of the other solutions that they can PoC as well. That's because we've seen that there are a couple of places in our environment where Veeam still makes logical sense versus Rubrik. Rubrik is able to hit about 95% to 98% of the things that we want to do, which is not going to be the case for every company, but it will fit most customers' needs.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. They're able to hit the mark about 95% to 98% of the time, and when we have problems, they're able to jump on and help out. We're always able to work through it. Sometimes, it might take time. There is no perfect product out there that I'm aware of, or else we would look at it.

It is used for backing up and restoring data.

Rubrik does snapshot backups. We have a virtual machine, which is a production machine. It is a production database server. We take a snapshot of the server to back up in Rubrik. When we need to test a version, or we need to test an application to do Windows patching and other things, we just stand up a virtual machine from the snapshot, put it in our test environment, and use that to test our patching. Everything that we have in production is also there in the test environment. So, when we test the patch, if anything breaks, we know we can't deploy it in production.

It is also useful in case a VM crashes. When a VM gets corrupted or crashes, we can just stand one up from last night's snapshot. We have our VM up in less than five minutes.

The feature that I found most valuable is Live Mount. You can either mount a virtual machine from a snapshot, or you can mount a volume from the snapshot. You can mount one disk to the server to retrieve data, or you can mount the whole VM, rename it, and use it as a test VM. If your VM gets corrupted, you just mount one from the snapshot, and you have your production VM's backup. So, Live Mount is definitely the best feature for me as an end-user.

Another feature that I love is their ransomware detection. Rubrik has one of the best ransomware detection out there. 

The backups are immutable, and nobody can change them. You can't override them. You can't change anything in the backups once the snapshot is taken. Our backup retention is 120 days. So, for 120 days, nobody can change that. When I take a snapshot of a server, if the next day we get hit with ransomware, I could shut that down. I can then just stand one up from the backup that I took yesterday. They can't change anything that is already in the backup.

There is room for improvement in pricing. After the licensing, the price tends to go up as time goes by. 

It is very stable.

It is definitely scalable. It is used to the extent of any other application in our production environment. We will definitely increase its usage.

Because this is a backup and restore application, only system administrators are the ones who schedule all the backups and do all the restores. There is also an option where you could give a user permission to do certain things. For example, we have DBAs who have access to restore databases. They cannot overwrite anything, but they can mount, and they can copy.

When you sign a contract with them, support is a part of the package. Their tech support was very knowledgeable. They allow you to do your work, and if you run into a problem, they jump in and help you. They explain the issue to you so that in the future, you know what you're doing next. They don't just do things behind the scenes to fix things. They keep us in the loop. Their technical support is second to none.

We used Commvault. Commvault had started to become a little bit cumbersome when it was time to do upgrades. We had all physical servers from Commvault. We had 12 media agents, and at the time of upgrade, we had to individually upgrade all 12 media agents. So, upgrading with Commvault was a two-week project for us, whereas upgrading with Rubrik is a two-hour project.

It was totally straightforward. There was absolutely no stress or chaos. It was an easy deployment and easy migration.

Our environment is pretty huge. We have about 8,000 to 9,000 servers. The deployment took a few months. It probably took five to six months, but the nice thing about it was that Rubrik's support was there all the time. They were involved at every step till we completed our migration.

For deployment, we had two people from Rubrik. From our side, we had five people for deployment. For its maintenance, there are three people who take care of it all the time. They're backup administrators. They back up and restore the system. We have one engineer who is involved in this project for designing and implementation, which is me.

My boss and his seniors would know how much money they have invested and how much money or value it is bringing. From my perspective, it is saving us a lot of money because previously, we had Commvault, TSM, NetBackup, and Veeam. Replacing these four with Rubrik has definitely saved us a lot of money.

Its price tends to go up with time. Its pricing definitely has room for improvement. If you negotiate right with them, you might get a good price.

Support is a part of the package, and every three years, when we renew our contract, we get new hardware.

We evaluated Cohesity. We had NetBackup, but Rubrik was best geared for us because we also have a cloud initiative. So, we needed a solution that we could use to back up on-prem and to the cloud. We wanted to be able to swap virtual machines from on-prem. We wanted to take an on-prem virtual machine and stand it up in the cloud. Rubrik had exactly what we needed. One of the main features that helped us make our decision was ransomware detection.

If data security is one of your main priorities, I would definitely recommend Rubrik. Its features work great. They have all the features that I need. What I would like us to purchase is a feature called Sonar, where you run a scan, and it tells you where patient data is sitting. If an end-user has patient data on the desktop, it'll tell you that this is where the patient data is. So, we can see who is really within compliance and who is not.

I would rate Rubrik a nine out of 10.

We came from two different systems. We had one product that was for our campus side and a different product for the hospital side. We wanted to bring those together and not have too many products in one environment. Rubrik covers everything in our VMware, for both campus and hospital. It does all of our backups. Anything that gets backed up for either side now goes through it.

We were siloed out into many different teams on both sides and we had a backup team on campus and a backup team on the hospital side. When those were brought together, the backup teams were dissolved and they were put into the VMware side where they're now managing hardware and server hardware refreshes.

My team is now the storage and backup team and we've taken on that task. Backups are offered as part of pretty much any ticket requesting a new server, for campus or hospital, that is a request for a new server. We spin up the backup at the server creation.

Our Rubrik is all on-prem. We back up our VMware environment and we also do a few physicals. We do some SQL and we do some Oracle.

It depends on what we're recovering, but some recoveries, before Rubrik, would take 30 minutes-plus. Now, similar recoveries that we've done have taken only seconds.

Also, when we first put this into place, we were actually moving to a hybrid cloud approach as well. We were trying to offer server creation as a simple ticket. We were doing this through offering the products, the catalog, and the automation behind everything to spin up the servers and deal out the storage. The two products that we actually have in our environment weren't very friendly with that automation piece but Rubrik, with its SLA policies, makes it very easy for us to say, "Hey, if this is a tier-zero application, we want this SLA applied globally," although there aren't very many of those in our environment. And if it's a tier-one application we can say, "Oh, we want this SLA applied." It does a very good job of keeping things clean in our environment. We also went through making sure we have everything tagged in VMware so that Rubrik can just pull that tag and apply that SLA. So things work pretty smoothly with all of that together.

We use the archival functionality. We tend to keep things on a Brik for a certain amount of time and, of course, it's a larger amount of time for tier-zero applications. And then we archive off to a private cloud that we have here at the university. That definitely keeps costs down because we have a deep and cheap storage solution for that cloud, Hitachi Content Platform. That was one of the main reasons that we went with Rubrik, as well, as it is compatible with HCP. We have quite a few petabytes of that and we wanted to make sure that we could leverage that and use it to our advantage.

Another benefit has been that management time has gone down significantly. Before, we had those two teams, one team for NetBackup and one team for Commvault. Each of those teams had two people on them. Now, we have one person on the storage team who is dedicated pretty much to backups, and the rest of us jump in as needed. We've really been able to consolidate that effort, and since it's an easy to use interface, we were able to pick up and run with that as a storage team. But with NetBackup before, we did have to build out quite a few servers and other stuff to get it into HCP. The whole model behind that, having lots of media servers, was very costly when you add in all of the hardware costs, licensing, et cetera. With this, it's quite a bit cheaper.

And Rubrik has definitely reduced downtime, because if we can spin up a recovery faster to that local CPU and the storage of Rubrik and have it up instantly, we can definitely get back to work sooner.

We do like the instant recovery because, beforehand, we would tell people, "Hey, it's going to take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to spin this up and, in that time, we're going to need your help with certain questions." We would sit there and work with them, but it always took quite a while. Now, we say, "Okay, give me 15 seconds and I can get this back up for you." And within that 15 seconds it's on and the only thing that we have to do afterwards is vMotion it off of the Rubrik storage back to where it should rest.

We also like the web interface. We mainly log in to the node and work from that, but occasionally we will log in and look at things when offsite. It's very intuitive and it works really well.

In addition, the solution's APIs play in with our automation piece for hybrid cloud. We wanted everything to work without manual interaction. We wanted everything to just play through when a ticket is submitted and automatically spin up the backup that we wanted, based on the tag in the VMware object. Our VMware team was the one that mainly looked at those APIs and built all of that out, but they haven't had any issues with it. It's worked exactly as designed.

The interface is still slightly clunky and has room for improvement. They do work with us whenever we mention anything that needs to be done or anything that we want. We find that bringing up the management interface is a little slow and not as intuitive as we would like, but it's been getting better as it evolves.

Rubrik is a somewhat new company, so it needs to become a little more established, and that just comes with time. It's not really too much of a concern or a weakness. It's just something that hasn't happened yet.

We've been using Rubrik for about a year and a half to two years now.

The stability has been good. We don't run into a ton of issues on it.

The scalability is wonderful. That is one of our biggest advantages with this. We can scale out as big or as small as we need to. We went with 20 nodes or so at the start and we've got over 40 now. We continue to expand as needed. We're still not all the way done with rolling this out to replace everything, but every year we're getting more and more nodes in there and replacing more and more.

We've covered about 85 percent of our environment. With the other 15 percent, it wasn't that Rubrik couldn't handle it, it's that the budget only allows for so many nodes to be purchased at a time. On top of that, we need to make sure that we do it in a way that's non-disruptive for work, and there are some teams that would be affected by disruption. We need to go a little bit at a time, which is what we've done. 

For the future, I do see us using it more. We have been doing a soft launch on Oracle, because we needed the tool that Rubrik has that allows for integration. That was still in something of an early stage of development, and we weren't comfortable putting it into production until it was in a more developed state. So we have used Rubrik to back up Oracle, but we've gone about using less of the automation pieces that Rubrik offers, and we're using it more as just a landing spot until that is fully developed. That's about the only piece that we're going to use more in the future.

When we have run into issues, we've reached out to our support team at Rubrik and they've been very quick to respond. Whether they're in the office or not, they do take our calls and help us out. It's always a quick response.

They're a newer company, so I'm sure they're still establishing their place, but the escalation teams and everybody that we've worked with have been capable and they've been able to fix our problems without having to bring in too many people.

We had Commvault and NetBackup before. Both of those were based on costly consumption-based licenses, and our CIO really disliked that model. The licenses that we had had been increasing in cost year after year and it just wasn't feasible to keep two separate products that weren't a good fit for the automation piece, for hybrid cloud. And they were on a slightly more pricey model. So rather than going to one or the other, we went out to see if there was anything that made more sense at the time. And that's when we found Rubrik.

With Rubrik, we have an agreement where it isn't license-based, and we are able to add more Briks as needed and more clusters as needed. It makes it extremely easy to expand our backup environment as the need arises.

With the other models out there, you would buy one quota and then you would hit it and prices would change and other things would happen. They have you locked in, no matter what. It was basically a situation where you had to pay whatever price they said you had to pay. With Rubrik, it's been very nice to have all of the equipment in our own data center and to have a little bit more control. For example, if we think we're going to need this much next year, this is what the hardware cost is going to be, and we can pay for any additional capacity that we need. That's been really nice with Rubrik.

Setting up Rubrik was both a little bit straightforward and a little bit of complex. We had the team that sold us the product there with us during setup and we went to add in all of the nodes at the same time. That was something that even that team had thought we could do, and then they remembered, in the middle of adding all the nodes at the same time, that we needed to do it in groups. That does take time. We were putting in something like 16 or 20 nodes, and we had to do it four-at-a-time. We had already done the physical installation and all the cabling, and all that portion. But when we started to add in the nodes, we had to do four and then wait for it to finish on that, and then do another four and wait for it to finish on that.

I think that, with time, they may implement a system that cues them up and continues to add nodes as it can. But that seems to be a similar problem to what occurs with other products in the same category. We also have Cohesity in our environment, which we don't use as a backup product, we use it strictly as a NAS, and it suffers from that same issue.

Our Rubrik setup took a few days, between our getting network issues figured out on our side, getting all of the cable management figured out with our data center team, the physical installs, the configuration with the Rubrik partners, and then adding in those nodes four-at-a-time until we had them all in.

We could have done it with less staff but we did want to make sure that all of us were aware of how the implementation worked, so we brought in all five of our team, two Rubrik partners, and two of our reseller partners, as well.

For maintenance of Rubrik we require two to three people. One works on Rubrik pretty much all the time, and the other four of us just jump in as needed on little things here and there.

In terms of Rubrik users, in addition to the five of us who do administration, we've given out access to a few of our database groups, so far, where there are 10 to 15 people.

Our reseller was ASG at that time, now it's Sirius. Everything was fine with them. On the Rubrik side, we had an engineer and a sales engineer, and that worked really well.

With Rubrik, we have been able to allocate FTEs to the other areas. We could have eliminated them but we chose to reallocate them. As we've had people either retire or move on to something different, we've either not replaced some, or we've been able to replace some of them with lower-level staff, simply because of the ease of use of this product.

On the hospital side, the ROI is from the lower cost, less work to manage it, and the smaller footprint in the data center, which means less power and cooling.

The pricing and licensing of Rubrik is better than products that we've had in the past. It was quite a bit cheaper than Commvault and NetBackup.

We actually reached out with our VAR and we evaluated anybody that could use the HCP that we have for archive storage. There weren't too many on the market that could do that. Rubrik was really the only solid option that we had at the time, other than Commvault and NetBackup. We weren't too happy with the latter two because of how much they were costing at that time.

We did physical PoCs in our environment and we did have Cohesity and Rubrik side-by-side, as well as NetBackup and Commvault. We did PoCs for moving to public cloud as well, for some of these services. The PoC with Rubrik stood out. 

Make sure that you work with your support team that's going to support you after your purchase and make sure that you're able to work with them well, before you pull the trigger on it. We like to build partnerships. When we have those partnerships, we're able to really rely on them for a long time.

I am a fairly new entry into the backup field. Before, we had Commvault and NetBackup, and when they were showing us how to use those, and trying to teach us some of the terms in the backup world, it felt like backup was a very niche piece of IT, and that there was a lingo and a language behind it. It seemed that there were definite things that people had experienced before that were common among all backup products, and things that they were left wanting or hating. With this new product, Rubrik, we walked into it blind, not being backup admins, and it made a lot of sense to us. And when we did bring in a backup admin, they said it was quite different to anything that they had worked on previously, and that it made more sense and that it was just quite a bit easier to manage.

Rubrik is something that everybody can understand fairly easily, and when we have given others access to it, such as the database teams, and we've let them run with it and see what they can do, they've been able to implement it really well. They've been able to figure out how to implement the tool in exactly the way that they wanted, whereas before there may have been limitations.

We haven't used the ransomware recovery at this point. We've got some protection behind that, where they are locked down and require additional effort to delete and to change. We follow guidelines from our IT security team and Rubrik together. We just haven't seen a scenario yet where we've actually needed to use that.

We have used Rubrik's predictive search, although we don't use it too much right now. Mainly, the way that we've used it so far has been the traditional backup and restore, where we get tickets stating that a backup needs to be spun up and it's done automatically. Then, when somebody comes back later on and says, "Hey, we need this item restored," we're able to call them up and restore it with them on the phone, within a matter of minutes. We haven't really had to use the file search too much or a lot of the tools that they have available for us, just because the need hasn't been there yet.

When it comes to recovery, we usually spin it up and turn it over to the team that asked us to recover that data. The information and identity access management team had to spin one up recently. They said that they had a bad patch and wanted us to spin back to that morning. We did that, and it had lost some of the network settings and some of that stuff that they were used to getting. We spent about 15 to 30 minutes with them and everything was back exactly the way that it should be. But that was pretty much exactly the same with other products that we had so it wasn't something new for us.