What is the biggest difference between Rubrik and Veeam?

I use both. In an ideal world, we would have full redundancy from power to cooling to servers. Why would you only have one backup server and repository? Both are strong products, though I would pick Rubrik if I only could choose one because it's much more hands-off on a day to day basis.

Common misconceptions from Rubrik:
Sometimes, Rubrik makes inaccurate or incomplete claims that suggest their solution is better. The following section will help you separate the facts from the FUD and respond to concerns that your customers may have.

Rubrik will claim that Veeam has many components and takes longer to install than their appliance.

Veeam’s response:
Veeam is a software-defined solution. Once the solution has been properly architected for your customers’ environment, installation is as straightforward as pressing "Next" on the installation wizard. All of Veeam’s components can be installed on a single VM or physical server if desired. Typically, larger customers choose to scale out a Veeam solution by adding additional proxies or repositories for additional throughput, capacity or load balancing. This scalable enterprise architecture is what enables Veeam to provide Hyper-Availability to ¾ of the Fortune 500.

How to counter:
Rubrik is easy to install because all the components are deployed with the physical appliance. However, just because
something doesn’t require configuration does not mean that the solution is any less complex. Rubrik has schedulers,
databases and data movers just like most backup products. A key difference is that Rubrik does not enable its customers to customize those components. Rubrik’s "one-size-fits-all" approach to scale simply does not apply in many enterprise environments. A Rubrik customer is forced to add compute and memory when they simply need more storage, or they are forced to add more storage when they simply need more throughput.
With Rubrik, your customers may be paying a premium for components that are not customized to their needs.

Rubrik will claim that their solution has no single points of failure and Veeam has many points of failure due to its design.

Veeam’s response:
Veeam is a fully-featured enterprise-grade application. As such, it is architected to be fault tolerant. Multiple proxy servers can be deployed, providing load balancing and failover. Backup copy jobs can be implemented to immediately copy backup files to a secondary location in the event of a disaster or failure of the primary backup storage. Veeam can even back itself up! Veeam does rely on a functioning Microsoft SQL Server database just like many other enterprise applications. Your customers are likely protecting themselves from a single point of failure for their existing applications and Veeam does not have to be an exception.

How to counter:
Rubrik is not immune to failures or data loss. Rubrik is built on commodity hardware that can certainly fail resulting in catastrophic data loss. There are scenarios (losing nodes in a cluster, losing multiple disks in a cluster) where a customer will lose data or the Rubrik cluster will become unavailable — resulting in missed SLAs and compliance violations. Veeam is completely customizable to your individual customers’ environment. With a proper hardware design, a Veeam solution can be just as failproof as Rubrik — if not more so.

Rubrik will claim that Veeam upgrades are difficult and that their solution can be upgraded more easily.

Veeam’s response:
There is zero complexity in upgrading a Veeam environment. A customer simply downloads the latest version from Veeam’s website launches the installer and follows the instructions. All components, including the backup server, proxies and repositories are updated from this single, straightforward process. In fact, Veeam customers consistently rate "satisfaction with product upgrade process" extremely high in customer satisfaction survey results — one of the many reasons that Veeam has achieved an NPS of 73 — 3.5x higher than the industry average.

How to counter:

It took Rubrik a few versions of their product before they were able to offer customer-driven upgrades, but now that they do, the process is about the same. When software is independent from the hardware that it runs on, flexibility and customizability are increased. There are tried and true methods for upgrading storage, processors, memory and other hardware components on the hardware your customers’ run in their data centers. Upgrading Rubrik’s hardware appliances is not as straightforward and requires special components that are — of course — sold for a significant premium.

When comparing Rubrik with Veeam, it is important to understand their stated purpose along with what capabilities they bring to the table. Rubrik is first and foremost a complete HCI based backup solution. Rubrik helps enterprises move away from traditional backup solutions with media and master servers and backup targets etc. With Rubrik you get a single 2U HCI box that includes compute, storage, network. There is no add-on software. Rubrik does it all. You can use Rubrik to backup your virtual as well as physical environments (x86 and RISC). Furthermore, Rubrik can replicate to either cloud instances or to other appliances at a secondary site. The goal is always to provide DR for your backups. It is not a typical DR/availability solution in the likes of a VMWare SRM or Zerto.

In short, Rubrik is not an availability solution. Veeam provides both backup and availability. Veeam is software only giving you choice with hardware. Rubrik can be taken as a box or as a solution from top hardware OEMs. The question to ask is what is that you are looking to achieve. If it is pure backup, then both will do. If you are looking for add on capabilities, that’s when you will need to dig in deeper.

1. Mainly Rubrik Cloud Data Management is in the form of appliance so customers don’t need to spend more on external storage (also with built in compression and deduplication makes it as efficient as enterprise storage)

2. Live Mount feature that is available to mount backup in under one minute. This Love Mount can be used for DevOps or audit.

3. Google-like file search feature that simplifies the backup process

4. Customizable SLA for every file

5. All software is included in a single bundle.

For years enterprise businesses have had multiple data protection services. This is because clients’ data is diverse and no one solution can meet all the needs of all workloads.

To provide an answer to which one will work best, you have to first understand what workloads they are trying to protect and what are they trying to protect against, as some clients don’t create second copies for just restore, but moreover will do it for compliance with long term archives.