Rubrik Reviews

Our primary use case is on-premises backup and cloud DR. We're using the Rubrik appliance with their CDM technology for our on-premises solution. We are also using their CloudOut technology to leverage their cloud DR as part of their offering.

We're backing up Windows infrastructure and on-premises applications such as SQL and Exchange file servers, and we're storing that locally on their appliance. Then, we replicate our environment to the cloud so that in the event of a true disaster, where we lost our physical infrastructure, we'd be able to spin up in the cloud, using their CloudOut technology. This would allow us to be up and running in the cloud until we were able to get infrastructure back online.

The environments that we are backing up are physical and virtual. We don't have any cloud-native environments, so we're not doing any cloud backups right now. We use the cloud, although it is a DR target. Our main task is VM backup, which is between 75% and 80%. We have a few physical boxes that we're backing up, as well. For example, I have the actual hypervisors to back up, and then a few miscellaneous other servers that haven't been virtualized.

The applications and servers that we protect include Microsoft Hyper-V for our virtualized infrastructure, Microsoft SQL server for the SQL side, and all of the other infrastructure, in terms of applications, that is Windows-based. We are very invested in the Microsoft platform and using Rubrik to back all aspects of that up. We do have a couple of Linux-based services running, but I would say that we're 95% Windows-based, whether that's Hyper-V VMs or Microsoft SQL, or Microsoft file servers or IAS app servers. 

One of the ways that Rubrik has improved the way our organization functions is time savings. Coming off of the backup solution we had before, we were spending several hours a week, every day sometimes, dealing with backups that fail. Other issues include trying to make space or deal with an archive target that was offline. We were just spending a lot of time on it.

Being a smaller team, when we spend time just dealing with the backups, that takes away from us being able to work on other projects that support the business growth and support other functions within the organization. With Rubrik, there'll be weeks sometimes that I never log into it. Maybe two, three weeks at a time, I never log into Rubrik because we get email alerts and they have great error handling. If there's an error or something happens, we get an email.

A lot of times, the appliance will take care of itself and then deal with that missed backup, or whatever happened. But that's very rare. It'll go for several months without having an error. A lot of times, the errors are not a Rubrik issue. It's always that Windows did something that caused the backup to fail and Rubrik reruns it, then it works.

Not having to spend any time in the console because we can rely on the alerting and automated reporting has allowed us to focus on other areas of the business and not deal with backups. Essentially, it gives us peace of mind that Rubrik works. It was definitely a change to get used to, not logging in to it. We buy this really cool piece of technology and turns out that we're not in it a whole lot, but that just goes to show Rubrik has a robust solution that we can depend on.

This product has definitely increased productivity because we're not dealing with backups. They work on their own and it does its thing. We made the investment into Rubrik to not have to deal with backups and it delivers on that. This leaves us time to focus on other things because we're not dealing with a backup that failed.

It is difficult to put an exact number on the amount of time that we're saving by using Rubrik, although, with our previous solution, there were weeks where we had to spend several hours dealing with failed backups. On a bad week, it may have been between six and eight hours. On average, by not dealing with backups at all, we are saving several hours a week.

Using the SLA-based policy automation has simplified our data protection operations. We are no longer scheduling backups or trying to figure out availability, or time slots, where we can back up our systems. For example, we don't have to consider things like we've got backups running at 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, or 3:00 AM, and we're trying to find a slot. Instead, the SLA engine that they have is super easy to use and does that job for us.

It was really good for us to move to the SLA-based approach from a traditional backup because we were able to, for business use, cover tasks such as retaining email for one year. In their SLA engine, it's very easy to find that. Another example might be backing up a set of test-SQL servers where we only need 14 days. Through the policy engine, you set what you want the retention to be and it takes care of scheduling and managing those backups.

Once we have them set, they are stable and continue to work because we don't change SLAs often. We define the retention that we need for each app and each service, and then it just works. Overall, the SLA-based approach makes it very easy to achieve your backups.

Luckily, we have not used their ransomware recovery. We've not had any incidents or ransomware where we needed to, but we have tested recovering assets in the event that happens and we've always been able to recover in our test scenarios, in our tabletop exercises. This is the type of feature that you never want to rely on outside of testing because it means that you're having a bad day, so hopefully, we never have to use it. That said, if we do have to, we're confident that it would deliver.

Similar to the case with ransomware, we have been lucky in that we haven't had any major disasters where we had to fully recover anything. In the usual case, where files are lost because something is overwritten, or something gets deleted, it has definitely saved a lot of time with the instant recovery.

Using the predictive file search, we're able to put those files or directories back or roll back a database in a few minutes. It's very quick and has definitely reduced our recovery time. We've not had to do a lot of restores, but when we do have to restore the occasional file or put a database version back, it's very quick and has saved us quite a bit of time from what the old Unitrends system would have looked like.

This product has also saved us time with respect to managing backups. Prior to Rubrik, every day of the week, we were spending an hour or two hours or sometimes longer dealing with backups, and that's now completely gone. There are some times that we go for weeks and don't even log into the appliance because we get the reports and they tell us everything we need. We trust Rubrik because we've had it long enough now that we know that when it says it completed the backup, the backup's there, and if we need it, we can get it back.

The most valuable feature is the Instant Recovery, where we can restore a VM or SQL database or any server or application, and have it up and running on their appliance within a few seconds. The recovery time of the instant restore is instantaneous and there is no complexity to it. What we're recovering doesn't matter to them, and we don't have to wait for it to mount a recovery image or do anything like that. When they say instant, they mean instant.

The ease of use is important to us, as well. It's super easy to get set up. Within a few hours of them deploying the on-premises appliance, we were backing up data locally into the cloud and able to test restores.

Rubrik is really good about releasing updates and we have had no issues with the process. They make it very easy, working with their support when they do put out an update, and they assist with doing the health checks beforehand to ensure that there are no issues. They do a pre-flight check on those updates to ensure that they're compatible with the appliance. Then, we schedule a time off-hours to apply it. They are normally pretty quick and we've never had issues where we had to roll back. They've always been flawless updates.

The CloudOut technology allows us to replicate data in our environment to the cloud, and then it can be spun up and used in the cloud if our physical environment is not available.

The VM backup and the SQL backup are blazingly fast for both backup and recovery.

The web interface is really good. and it's only gotten better with every update. It was good, to begin with, but they've improved the speed and added features in each update. It is a modern interface that works in any browser, and we can get to it from a tablet or computer. The type of device you access it from doesn't matter because it fits all screens, and it's intuitive and easy to use.

The archival functionality is very good. It is very easy to archive data to the cloud, and this is something that we were looking for. You can do it all from their web interface, which is a plus. You don't have to jump into the command-line interface or run scripts or anything to make it work. It is all configurable in the UI and very easy to dump data off to the cloud and pull backups back from the cloud archives.

We have used the predictive search functionality and hands down, it's the easiest way that I've ever recovered files. It's just like searching Google, but it searches your own files for recovery. It's easier than if you told somebody you could use a Google-like search to recover files, I don't think they would believe you until they've used Rubrik, because it does work that well. It's quick to search, no matter if you're searching a VM or even a physical box, it works across them.

With their new global file search in the latest version of their CDM, you don't even have to know what host that file was on. You can just type in a file name or a part of the file name and it'll find it. When a user comes and says, "We lost the file and it was called something like this," with any other solution, I don't know how you would find it. I think it would take a lot of work. With Rubrik, within a few seconds, you have file results. It's a pretty great feature.

We would like to see more support for Hyper-V. They support Hyper-V and it works with our CloudOut, the cloud DR, but they seem to add features for VMware first and Hyper-V gets added second or sometimes several releases after the VMware feature comes out. Seeing more support for Hyper-V would be a plus.

We have been using Rubrik for about a year and a half.

This solution is very stable, dependable, and reliable. We've had it for a year and a half and nothing has ever happened with the appliance, or come up where we'd think differently.

Their updates have been really good and we've never had an issue after applying an update where something didn't work.

Knowing that Rubrik has built a robust platform, which is what we're dependent on, gives us peace of mind.

This solution is highly scalable. You can add nodes as needed and expand the environment. There are no limitations to it in terms of hardware or Rubrik's support.

In order to expand, you would have to purchase licensing. Depending on the company's budget, that could be a limiting factor. As long as you can afford the licensing, if you grow then Rubrik can grow with you.

There are three of us in the company who use the product from a management standpoint. I am the system administrator, the CIO has access, and then the support tech has access to the system. I am responsible for maintaining it.

It is integrated 100% within our organization. We have no plans to do anything more with it because it's being used in every aspect of the business for backup and protection. We're fully invested and committed to it.

The vendor has world-class support, and some of the best support we have for our solutions. Rubrik support has been great to work with when we do have to work with them, which isn't often.

Prior to Rubrik, we were using the Unitrends solution for our backup. We switched because we couldn't depend on the Unitrends product. It was missing backups, for example. There were some times where every day, every week, five days a week, we'd spend a couple of hours a day, or maybe an hour a day, in Unitrends trying to get backups to run because they would miss a whole set of SQL servers or miss VMs.

We also couldn't do cloud archiving with it. It just wasn't capable of that.

I think we had outgrown the Unitrends solution. I think Unitrends is great for a small company, but anything small to medium and larger, Unitrends just isn't a good solution.

It seems like a very traditional backup solution. It's not forward-thinking and innovative and new like Rubrik is. So, we just knew that we needed something that we could depend on because, with Unitrends, we knew that if there was a disaster, we couldn't recover and so that's why we started looking at something else. We were very happy when we found Rubrik. It restored the peace of mind that we didn't have with Unitrends.

The initial setup is straightforward. Rubrik sends out a technical engineer when you get the appliance to help you get it online. Within a couple of hours of them being on-site, we were backing up data locally, as well as to the cloud. By the time they left, we had tested restores and our environment was backing up locally and into the cloud.

We did not have an implementation strategy and just followed Rubrik's guidance on how to implement it. They had a plan that was based on information that we provided them about our environment. That way, when they were on-site, we maximized our time with them to get it deployed. We really just trusted Rubrik with it.

There were two people from our company and one person from Rubrik involved with the deployment. I was on the technical implementation side, and our CIO was involved in the purchasing, decision-making, and ultimate sign-off on the solution.

The deployment was handled by Rubrik's technical support engineer, who is assigned to you during the sales process. They are somebody local, in fact. They are based in Iowa where we are.

You work with them through the whole sales process and then they help you get the appliance set up and then they're even your contact even after it gets set up. This means that if you ever have questions or you need assistance, they're the person to help and they're very knowledgeable. Our engineer was able to answer any questions we had.

In the sense that we're not spending IT resources on managing the solution, that's really been the return on investment.

Rubrik is definitely a premium solution, but if you can afford it and put it in your budget, they're definitely the way to go. They're not the cheapest solution on the block and I don't think they would tell you that they are. You pay a premium for Rubrik, but you're getting a premium service that comes with immutable backups, instant recovery, and world-class support. It's well worth the investment into Rubrik.

In the subscription, they have an appliance renewal program, and the maintenance is set up so that you know, upfront, what the potential increase is. They give you a range.

Before choosing Rubrik, we evaluated other solutions including Dell Avamar, which is their data protection solution. We also looked at Cohesity and with respect to Unitrends, we knew that they were out, so we didn't re-evaluate the product.

The results of our evaluation showed that Rubrik really outperformed the others, with just their support of Hyper-V. They all seem to support Hyper-V to some extent, but Rubrik seemed to have the best support for it at the time.

The speed of Rubrik and the ease of use also stood out, compared to the others.

The Dell solution was very much a traditional backup system and we wanted to get away from that. We wanted to go to something that was cloud-ready for archive and DR. We also wanted a product with great support for virtual machines because that's where our infrastructure was going. We just didn't get that feeling with the Dell solution. I'm sure that it is a great product and they probably sell a lot of it, but it wasn't the new solution we were looking for.

Then with Cohesity, we just didn't see it as a good fit. Overall, Rubrik just looked better and fit our needs better. We had to consider the infrastructure and the workloads we were protecting, as well as the features that we were looking for in terms of the easy backup and the immutable backup protection for ransomware, the CloudOut, and cloud DR technology. It all just was a little bit better in Rubrik and just beat out Cohesity.

We are heavily virtualized and have lots of SQL as well, which is why we picked Rubrik. These are two things that they are very good at.

They're definitely a forward-thinking and future-thinking company in terms of offering their VM backup and their SQL backup, so they really shine over the competitors we looked at.

Although the updates are really good, we are a little bit behind for some compliance reasons. However, we have access to all their features and we try to stay as current as possible. We're on almost the latest version.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it's a world-class solution. If you want peace of mind at night, immutable backups, cloud-native support, cloud DR support, all within a single solution with world-class technical support, Rubrik is the way to go. If you can afford it, you're getting the best. You're getting a premium solution and everything that they say they can do, they can do. They can prove it to you or customers can prove it. They've never oversold on what they can offer.

My biggest takeaway is that it's a good investment in your backups. It's not the cheapest solution, but the investment you're making protects your business and ensures that if you ever need your backups, they're going to work. You can trust Rubrik.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The solution is used for data center, backup, and recovery. Also, two companies are looking for an ERP solution, a Cyber Recovery Vault.

Rubrik can be described as a single solution where most things are integrated, making the aforesaid detail its valuable feature.

Pricing is something that needs to be considered for improvement. Pricing needs improvement when compared with a similar product coming from a Cohesity. The cost side is a bit higher, making the solution costly for our company.

I have been using Rubrik for more than five years. My company functions as a service integrator of Rubrik.

I haven't encountered any bugs or glitches using the solution.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My clients are mostly medium and enterprise-sized businesses.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I still need to get feedback on Rubrik's support. I think that regarding the feedback, we never faced many issues on the support side. Hence, I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I rate the implementation a seven on a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The majority of the deployments, like 80 percent, are done on-premises.

The deployment process takes a maximum of two weeks.

The number of people required for deployment depends on the data volume and the number of clients required. So, generally, we keep two people.

I rate the pricing an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high.

I would definitely recommend the solution to those planning to use it.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight 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.

Rubrik is for ransomware and stuff like that. Rubrik Polaris is an application as a service. So it's in the cloud and the version is V 2021817-9.

Rubrik Backup and Recovery and Polaris also help in case of recovery to identify ransomware and vulnerabilities.

We use it to back up our virtual environment, which consists of VMware, and we have some Cisco HyperFlex appliances there. It's an all-in-one appliance for storage.

We just actually started using Polaris just a couple of weeks ago. We primarily use it for reporting. We are not using Polaris for backing up cloud environments. We don't use Rubrik to backup our cloud environment.

Rubrik has reduced the time spent on recovery testing with recovery principles, especially the environments. It's hard to say how much it has reduced the time it takes to recover because if it's a single file, it's just faster to do it with Rubrik because it's easier. If it's a VM, it's pretty much almost instant recovery. On average it's three to five times faster.

It has also saved us time managing backups. It's pretty stable. So it sends us a report if something goes wrong, then you get a report. You don't really need to manually monitor this software over time. If something happens, you'll get an error and you'll get an email notification and then address it. We found the product pretty stable if it's configured correctly. So it has reduced management time.

Downtime for our production data has also been reduced because the recovery speed is faster and our outage is shorter. So we found that it definitely does improve our uptime for our production data. It has improved uptime 20 to 30%.

Our team's overall productivity goes faster and it's improved because we need less management. People can concentrate on tasks other than just babysitting data.

We get very good reporting in Rubrik, also. You have very good visibility into your backup. You can also define different levels of backup, for example, image-based backup. Live Mount is also a good feature to get recovery. 

It allows for easy integration. We use NetApp, so it integrates with NetApp snapshots. It is very easy to set up and start backing up. You don't need to do custom configurations. It's simple and straightforward compared to traditional backup solutions. It's easy to adapt the user interface and easy to navigate. It has good reporting. It also has nice monitoring. My dashboard is also very good.

The SLA-based policy automation is a good way to create different policies, such as retention, frequency of backups, or retention of backups based on the data owners' need for protection. We create different SLAs based on our requirements for data. And then when we need them, we find the appropriate SLA and just attach them to this SLA which makes it easy. You don't need to create a policy for each resource. You basically group your resources under the SLA.

The Archival feature is very good. Rubrik requires you to have at least one local copy on the Rubrik break, but then you can archive either to basically any storage. They also integrated clouds like Azure and AWS, where you can archive to a different tier. So you can apply archiving to F3 for something that you may need for faster recovery.

We, fortunately, didn't need to use Rubrik for ransomware. We also own Rubrik Polaris Radar, which creates a report and looks into our environment and any suspicious activities that could be related to ransomware so we can check right away. And if it's a real vulnerability, we can address it in a timely manner. We didn't have to do anything to recover from ransomware yet, but I feel like we are better protected now with Rubrik Polaris Radar.

The Polaris piece could use improvement. When you get a report and you have events that are suspicious, you cannot drill down and find out why it's suspicious. You only know it's suspicious, but you don't know the root cause. Other than that, everything works well.

Scalability is very good. As your need for backup capacity increases, you just add more to the same cluster. So it's all managed from one interface. You don't need to manage each process separately. It's easy to scale up. And you can replicate to the outside. 

Our environment is about 150 terabytes.

I would rate their technical support at least a nine out of ten. The support is very good. Nobody's perfect but it's very good.

I use a lot of different backups. For example, NetBackup from Symantec. The main difference between that and Rubrik is that Rubrik is policy-based, so it's easy to apply.

NetApp is very hard to configure. You would need a full-time employee just to manage and configure backups. With Rubrik, it's pretty much plug-and-play, so that's a big difference. And it works both in a physical and virtual environment, so that's another advantage.

The physical installation of appliances takes one day. And then configuration takes maybe another day but it also depends on how many data sources you have and if your policy is defined in advance. Sometimes we have to wait for data owners to define the requirement for backing up. Within one, two days, you can set it up and get it going.

The safety of our data is the main concern. We don't see a direct return on investment, but having our data protected is peace of mind. If it's lost and you can recover it quickly, it's a big value. So it's hard to value a return of investment on the backup software until you do a big restore. We do some small restores, and so far we see the value of the program.

The product is not cheap, the pricing is pretty high. The product is good, but the price could be lower. I wish it would be lower so we could back in more stuff. I wouldn't say it's great value as far as price is related.

We use the Evergreen Subscription Purchasing Program.

I think Rubrik is a very good backup solution. The only thing is that it's not cheap, but it is easy to understand and implement with great support. It's more expensive, but you don't need that many man-hours to work on your backup solution. It equates with some other product pricing, but I would recommend it. It works well, it's pretty reliable, stable, and easy to use. I don't see any negatives in Rubrik, only positives. They work to improve the product constantly as well. 

I would rate Rubrik a nine out of ten. 

Rubrik is our primary backup solution for production and development systems. We also use it for testing purposes when we need to spin off a temporary non-production environment. The solution protects some of our VM's, SQL, and even physical appliances.

A definite improvement using Rubrik has had on our organization is that it cuts down the operational time spent in the backup world, equaling fewer support calls and less time spent on engineering the product. This is because everything essentially functions straight out of the box. SLA-based policy automation is easy to use and easy to customize. It has made day-to-day operations a lot simpler because of the simplicity in creating SLA procedures. It saves us time.

The Live Mount is one of the most valuable features since it allows us to spin up copies of our current systems in what is just basically a development state.

The Rubrik archival functionality is also a good feature that works well and is definitely useful.

The integrated reporting is not really that nicely built. The reporting functionality could definitely be a little bit more customizable from an administration perspective, with an easier to understand interface.

I have been using Rubrik for four years.

Rubrik is definitely a stable product.

I consider Rubrik scalable because all you need to do is add another Brik and it's seamless.

At this point we have adopted it 100 percent, so we do not have plans to increase its usage.

I have found Rubrik's technical support to be extremely knowledgeable and easily accessible.

Prior to using Rubrik we used Commvault. We switched solutions because of the features, the simplicity of the product, and its speed. 

I'm spending less time managing the solution. I would estimate that Rubrik recovery testing saves us 80% in time as compared to our prior solution.

Rubrik's support is definitely on the expensive side, but I consider it to be top of the line. We incur no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees.

Needless to say, we evaluated Commvault, as we were making use of it at the time. Other solutions we evaluated include Veeam and Dell. I think it was the ease of use, reliability, and scalability of Rubrik that influenced our decision.

The Rubrik web interface is really easy to use. Three or four people work on Rubrik in operational roles.

In addition, our use of Rubrik Polaris, which is a SaaS-based framework, is showing good savings in the time it takes us to manage backups.

In response to customer feedback, Rubrik has already implemented an improvement which enables you to restore Active Directory at a more granular level.

Our primary use case is to back everything up. Rubrik backs up all of our servers on a schedule that takes the bulk of every bit of the mundane tasks out of our hands. It automates everything and frees us up to be able to look at issues where something may not have backed up correctly. We can then investigate those servers to see if they need to be updated or if there's a problem. 

A lot of times, admin will drop new servers out without telling anybody. We have SLA domains set up in order to catch those so that we're not completely caught off guard by them. We can put them in the proper SLA for the correct backup schedule and proper retention if it needs to be replicated automatically right away and from one site to the other. From there, if it needs to be kept longer, it'll go up to the cloud for cold storage.

When it comes to saving time managing our backups, Rubrik has saved us a lot of time compared to what we were using. It feels like it has saved us lifetimes of time because the process used to be difficult. It's not just the day to time savings. When something goes wrong, that's where the real time savings comes into play. We are able to get back to where we need to be more confidently and with much fewer steps.

As far as the day-to-day stuff goes, I don't know if there is a way to put an actual value on that other than things are not nearly as hectic on the day-to-day, stressing over whether or not the backups ran because, with Rubrik, we already know they ran.

In terms of reducing our recovery time, it has saved us hours. For a recovery event, it used to take hours into days and now it's less than an hour, it takes minutes. It's really impressive. Rubrik makes the job much easier. It's very intuitive, where everything used to be very complicated. You can almost have better job security because of how complicated it was. Whereas now, the setup of the whole system takes no time. There's a lot of day-to-day time savings that allows us to get freed up to do other things, but also to make sure that what we do have is working optimally. Before, there was a lot of stuff that would fall through the cracks that we wouldn't really know about until something went wrong.

Rubrik affects my team's productivity. I'm not even the main backup specialist on our team, but it freed up enough time for our backup specialists to show me how to do everything. It's ridiculously easy. It's simple enough for me to be able to do it where it's not my top priority task throughout the day. When something happens and someone needs a recovery, I'm able to go in and do it, even though I haven't done it in a week or so. Before, there wouldn't have been the time to show anyone else or take the time to actually learn to be able to instruct someone else on how to do it effectively and correctly.

It provides a lot of time for education and deep-diving into figuring out why certain things didn't work and then correcting those issues.

We protect virtual environments. It's all VMware, SQL database, and a few Oracle. There are some physical machines as well that require backup agents.

The recovery is the most valuable feature. The interface is very clean, streamlined, and simple to actually perform a recovery. It's four clicks away from being done, depending on what you want to do. That's on something that is already automated on top of that. All of the backups are already automated, so when something comes up and someone's requesting a backup or recovery of a server for whatever reason, it takes very little time to get in, find what you're looking for, and get it done. It's not a drawn-out process. 

The web interface is very intuitive. I compare it to an iPhone. Everything is where you expect it to be. The main tabs are very well laid out. The drop-downs inside of those tabs make sense. It's very easy to use and it makes sense. It's not the traumatic experience of older products.

The learning curve is incredibly short. The beautiful part about it is that it makes sense so that you don't have to use it every single day to be able to go back in and do what you want to do. There's a lot to be said for that.

I use Rubrik daily to ensure that everything backed up as expected. I look to see what may or may not have backed up and why. I do that aspect now a lot more. I do backups periodically when the main contact is not available. 

We use SLA-based policy automation. It solidified our data protection operations. That alone gave us the ability to simplify and streamline the process. We were able to come down with independent SLAs that met the specific needs for whatever department or server was being protected. Whether it's production, DevTest, utility servers, whatever the case is, there are individual SLAs that we're able to make simple changes at the wholesale level, if we need to. Once they're set up, they're good to go. It makes things very easy and we can set up a bunch of them which makes life tremendously easier.

In terms of the archival functionality, we pushed things off to S3 and it works. At that point, when you're bringing things back from archival, that can be a little slow, but that's a matter of things outside of Rubrik's control. It depends on what it is, where it's at, how old it is, and what it is you're paying for.

Predictive Search to find servers makes life so much easier. We're able to drill down and put it in a simple part of whatever server name it is. A lot of times people need the server restored. We check the server name and they give us some name that's not exactly the technical server name. We're able to fish down and find what we're looking for much quicker than trying to rely on them to give us the proper name. The Predictive Search definitely helps everywhere.

Our main Rubrik guy has used the API. I continually hear that it needs better documentation. I can't even get the API to work right but that's mainly on me. 

If there was something that we could get Rubrik to fix, it would be when our DBS takes snapshots of a server or the database, the replication doesn't kick off fast enough. They can't remote it to the peer site and manipulate it back up in order to move it over, take a copy of production, slap it over, and test it out. As I understand, they are working on it. Replication works. We also get spoiled by how good things are now. We get to a point where it is so easy but when something isn't instant gratification, it seems that everything else is so amazing, why isn't this right?

They're doing everything I need it to do. When everything works so well, and it's so fast, and then you stumble upon something that's not the speed of light, it's confusing. 

I've been using Rubrik for five years. 

We use both SaaS and physical appliances because we have Edge devices that are considered physical, but for the most part, the majority of everything we do is SaaS.

It's always on. It is available all the time.

Scalability is not an issue. 

Technical support is pretty good. You can reach out to a support agent and have someone talking to you that you can actually work with after 15 minutes. Opening tickets online is decent. 

If you give them a sad face on a review, someone will reach out and ask what happened and what they can do better. They're definitely all about customer service and customer support.

The installation was pretty simple.

The deployment strategy was four nodes on each side of each location and we have two locations. We did a POC and it was set up in no time. It was ridiculously fast and simple. Now, we're up to 16 nodes in each location.

There's not much to it. It's not a 28 step process. There's a little bit to it but it's plug-and-play, as much as a solution could be. 

My advice would be to do a proof of concept. You won't be sorry. Play with it. We came from other products that were nowhere near as capable or user-friendly as Rubrik, so when we got in, it was a night and day difference that Rubrik was so easy. 

Rubrik is so much better. We're always looking at other avenues and options because other companies will always ask us to show us their product but there's nothing out there that has made us even consider switching. There's a lot to be said for competence.

I would rate Rubrik a ten out of ten. 

We predominantly use Rubrik to back up VMware, VMs, SQL databases, Windows files, NAS data, and EC2 instances in Azure VMs.

We have two data centers with Rubrik installed on the bricks in those locations. Then, we have virtual nodes installed that are at customer sites. We are using it for AWS and a little bit of Azure, as well.

Rubrik covers my need for backup and disaster recovery for customers. We back up in our primary data center, replicate data to a secondary data center, and provide hot mount capabilities for customer VMs in the event of a disaster. We also use it for long-term archiving of on-premises customer workloads.

The SLA-based automation is a lot easier than worrying about what time we schedule jobs and what job needs to run at what time. Having the system determine the priority and scheduling jobs to meet compliance has made it a lot easier.

We have used the Ransomware Recovery feature and it is good. However, I think that it lacks a management-type reporting dashboard. It could be used to show the value in the product because generally, until something happens, it's seen as something that sits in the back end and you wonder if it's ever providing value. 

It has reduced the time we spent recovery testing. We can now automate using a script rather than a human. To do this, we utilize the APIs in PowerShell for generating those automation test restores.

We have a self-service portal for our customers, so our customers can log in and restore files themselves. Previously, that wasn't a capability that was available. In terms of time-saving, it's massive because if we can provide that functionality down to a customer and the customer can restore themselves, it's taken a hundred percent of the workload off of us and empowered the customer to do what they want to do.

The ease of use and innovation are the features that stand out for us. It provides the capability to drive down to the end-user, service desk level one, and use the system with minimal training.

The web interface is excellent, and we really like it. The Google search, capability for file restore, and the ability to integrate the API into third-party products are really good.

The archival functionality is excellent, supporting all the major cloud vendors. For our situation, it supports pretty much all of the archival methods that we would want to use for long-term retention. We archive data for up to seven years.

We have used the API support for integration with vCloud director to create a tenant self-service portal. Our next project will be looking into automation with ServiceNow.

We have used the predictive search feature and it drastically reduces the time it takes to find and restore data for people. It used to take perhaps hours to hot mount an image and then search it for a file. Now, we use the Google-like search to look not only across an individual VM but across the whole environment, with all of the VMs. We can find any file across terabytes of data in under 30 seconds and have a restore done, depending on the size of the file, in generally under five minutes.

The Office 365 protection could be improved. Specifically, the design of deploying a Kubernetes cluster to Azure for protecting Office 365, and only being able to protect in Azure Blob storage, is something that should be improved. Our preference would be to protect external to Azure. We could backup using the local bricks or appliances that we already have from Rubrik or alternatively, have the capability to protect out to AWS using alternative storage that's not visual-based.

I have been working with Rubrik for three years.

Stability-wise, it is really good. We've only ever had one node that needed to be rebooted, which didn't affect the uptime of the system. Excluding upgrades, we've had 100% uptime on the system for the past three years.

The scalability is excellent. We've regularly increased the capacity of Rubrik as we onboard new customers.

Between 30 and 40 people in the company probably use Rubrik, but that's obviously not every day because we have different staff on different rosters, and, being an MSP, we support multiple customers. From our side, we probably have a higher touchpoint of Rubrik given that we are supporting customers that are using it.

Our experience with technical support has been really good. Feature requests are predominantly what we're asking for, and every single time that we've ever asked, the engineering team's been really good at incorporating those features into future product releases. Being able to meet with the engineering teams on the future design of the UI and the actual functionality of the product has been really good.

Having that direct contact with engineering and being able to drive what we want the product to do has been really helpful, and we see that come out in a frequent cadence.

Previously, we had an Avamar data domain backup environment. It meant that anytime we had capacity constraints, what would happen was that Dell would come in and say that it was just as cheap to buy a new unit as it was to upgrade the existing one. It was always a big sell to supply the customer the newest and greatest thing, which sort of capped out at a certain capacity and couldn't really be expanded past that point.

Being an MSP, having expansion capabilities was really key for us. Having the ability to just add nodes, and have that capacity online inside 30 minutes was really fantastic. We know that the investment being made into the existing equipment isn't dead in the water, having to be thrown away later.

Implementing Rubrik has saved us time and money in managing backups, and I estimate that we've saved approximately 80% in terms of time compared to previously. This was in maintaining the system and doing upgrades. In terms of cost, we have had to hire a very expensive backup administrator that was really well versed in the Avamar product, and we constantly had problems with the upgrades once they were done. So, to move down to a lower-skilled and lower-cost resource, and have the task be completed in less time, was a significant dollar saving.

In the past, when we did upgrades, we could be offline for a week troubleshooting. Now, once we do an upgrade, we're back to doing backups within half an hour to an hour. 

We switched for ease of use, the total cost of ownership, and the cost to maintain. It came down to the financial benefits and the time benefits and in terms of ease of use and customer self-service. There were a significant number of reasons why we switched to Rubrik from the other platforms.

The initial setup was very easy. The longest time it took to deploy was getting the network team to configure network ports for us, and the IP addressing. Once that was done, we were up and running within 30 to 40 minutes of the initial deployment.

Starting with the racking and stacking in the data center, the entire deployment probably took half a day for half a petabyte of data protection.

To develop our implementation strategy, we had an initial meeting with Rubrik on the design and requirements from their side, in terms of network connectivity requirements and IP addresses. We had done a little bit of pre-work with the network team to get that up and running, and ready for plugin once the equipment was delivered.

Two of our staff were all that was required. You just need enough to lift and stack the equipment in the data center. We had assistance from a systems engineer at Rubrik.

We don't have anyone dedicated to day-to-day maintenance. I utilize my cloud staff to do the upgrades when required, but once the SLAs are configured, it almost runs itself. My service desk staff does the day-to-day backup checks and restores if needed.

Our ROI against the other products was within the first six to twelve months.

When we originally started using Rubrik, it was under an MSP program, where we were paying a subscription fee for the consumption of the appliance. We've since switched over to outright purchase and buy as we need.

The pricing has been quite good from our perspective, in terms of being able to negotiate with the Rubrik team to get the product that we want and be able to sell that out to our end customers.

I can't complain, but nonetheless, I'll always say it could be cheaper.

There are no additional costs in addition to the standard licensing fees that we're aware of.  We haven't implemented the Sonar feature at this stage because it cannot be licensed on a per-customer basis. Rubrik has a multi-tenant functionality, and given that we're an MSP, we provide that capability to our customers. However, Sonar is an all-or-nothing addition, so given the cost of that, we wouldn't be able to sell that to all of our customers. In fact, that is one of our pain points at this time. We would like to be able to enable it on a per-customer tenant basis.

Prior to selecting Rubrik, we looked at Cohesity, and we looked at maintaining our investment in our current platforms, which were Veeam and Avamar. We also had a brief look at Commvault, but the cost of ownership appeared too high.

Cohesity and Rubrik were the two front runners, given the next-generation platforms that we are developing. At the time we selected, there was no local support in Australia for Cohesity, which was one of the key reasons why we went with Rubrik. Rubrik did have local support and we felt that not having it would be a major problem.

Being a relatively new company, we also had concerns about whether Cohesity would be in business in two or three years. We had initially looked at Rubrik five years ago, and at that time we did not select them. It was not from a capability standpoint, but rather from financial viability. We wanted to make sure that Rubrik were financially viable before we selected them as a partner. After a two-year gap, we ended up implementing Rubrik.

The lesson that we learned from using Rubrik is that it is really good to have a vision of what we want and actually see it come to pass. We have the support of Rubrik to develop a product that we're really happy to use and we're happy to present and sell to our customers. Having Rubrik in the Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders and visionaries quadrant in the past twelve months has proven out our product selection for data protection.

My advice for anybody who is considering Rubrik is to test drive it or get a temporary environment set up. You won't regret it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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.