Rubrik offers rock solid, flexible data defense to keep your data safe and your IT team happy
May 18, 2021
Rubrik offers rock solid, flexible data defense to keep your data safe and your IT team happy
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Rubrik Cloud Data Management
- Rubrik Polaris
Overall Satisfaction with Rubrik
We utilize Rubrik to defend approximately 100 server VMs and 350 VDI desktops, as well as their supporting infrastructure, several SQL databases of various sizes, and some large file servers. Rubrik is our single-stop backup solution for the entire environment. We have a robust set of SLAs defined to give us precise recovery options from single machines to a full disaster scenario. Rubrik allowed us to defend 100% of our infrastructure while also cutting the overhead needed to manage it down to almost nothing. We use it regularly to recover data, and we also utilize the live mounts to perform quick recovery of machines that have issues. It has transformed the way we handle protection of our systems by letting us act with confidence that we have good, working backups of everything, in some cases down to an hourly or minute-specific window.
- Ease of setup and operation. Making changes is very easy and the UI is responsive and tends to 'just work' more than most products.
- Support. Rubrik's support is absolutely fantastic and one of the few where you can get a qualified, educated person on the phone immediately. If anything they typically respond faster than I expect them to. We rely on support frequently for questions about some of the weirder things in our environment and they knock it out of the park each time.
- Reliability. Unless you are ingesting more data per snapshot than your network can support, Rubrik will always defend your data. It's to the point where it's almost dangerous, because the temptation to lean back and let it handle everything is very strong. The only time we have had an issue was when we were trying to snapshot a 50+TB virtual server every hour, which was a little too much, but everything else is rock solid. Issues so far have all been stemming from our infrastructure, not Rubrik.
- Rubrik does not "understand" VMWare instant clones. This means we have to manually exclude folders with hundreds of VMs. It's not a problem, but it is a minor gripe that the UI has a big blob of 'manually excluded' VMs in the dashboard.
- On extremely long recovery operations (e.g. across MPLS/WAN connections or very large servers) it is possible to get 'stuck' where you cannot cancel or move on with a job. This has more to do with vMotion limitations and the recommended use case is to put a Brik at each location, so this is not much of a problem - but if you try to defend multiple sites with a single remote Rubrik cluster you may have issues if you don't have a very fast connection between them.
- We have had a handful of issues where a failed backup (e.g. due to a storage connectivity issue) caused a VM to get 'stuck' in the Rubrik storage policy. However, this is more of an infrastructure reliability problem than a Rubrik problem, and support is always quick to take care of the issues for us.
- The ability to deliver strong business continuity has been worth FAR more than we paid for the solution. Our previous backup system was undersized and underperforming, and RTO for a full outage was measured in weeks. Currently we can bring up core production within a few hours, and that is with a series of huge file servers - we expect to see that time drop as we break the servers out
- Having 365 and Azure backed up through Polaris has saved us from what would have been embarrassing client-facing issues when emails were lost or deleted.
- We are so much more confident in our systems that we are able to make system changes rapidly to keep pace with the company, knowing that we can always just take a quick backup and revert if needed. We are even using the Rubrik cluster to transition workloads between otherwise incompatible vCenter deployments, allowing us to seamlessly replace whole clusters with no downtime.
- Veeam Backup & Replication, Cohesity, Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery and Dell Data Protection | Encryption Enterprise Edition (DDPE)
We spent six months evaluating our options between these vendors, doing demos and reviews wherever we could.
Commvault was far too complex for our team without bringing in additional staff. By all accounts it is extremely powerful, but looking at the requirements to implement it, we decided against it as we don't have the staff to spare a full time position just for backup administration.
The Dell solution was good, but at the time we evaluated it, it was still new and not mature enough yet. We found that it was simpler than Commvault, but still required something like 20 different hostnames and IPs and quite a lot of moving parts to do what it does. I believe that their newer versions would be closer to Rubrik's ease of use and setup now, but at the time it was no comparison.
Cohesity was the closest competition to Rubrik, and it was close. However, Cohesity is designed to be a 'data platform' and host your data, and it was clear that we were paying for that regardless of how they presented the data to us. Our data is pretty complex and does not lend itself well to a NAS or appliance based storage model, and for slightly more than the price of Cohesity we were able to get Rubrik as well as Polaris.
We had a long, generally happy history with Veeam and were generally happy with it. At the time of our purchase, many of Rubrik's core features were not available in Veeam. In version 10 they have added a lot of them, but we also liked that Rubrik was a self contained appliance solution, so we didn't have to build servers or infrastructure, and we all agreed that the Rubrik UI and overall experience was better as well.
Do you think Rubrik delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Rubrik's feature set?
Yes
Did Rubrik live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Rubrik go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Rubrik again?
Yes
Rubrik Feature Ratings
Using Rubrik
8 - Right now, only IT staff use Rubrik. We have staff from helpdesk roles all the way to management that are all comfortable using Rubrik for both user data restoration and servers/projects. Everyone took to it immediately and required minimal training to get them to use it.
3 - Support is done by our internal admin team, but most issues are solved by Rubrik support without needing our involvement.
- VMware backups
- SQL backups
- Azure/365 workload backups
- File share backups
- We use the instant recovery feature as a change-rollback button. If a change doesn't go as planned, we just revert the machine and we're done. This lets us try things quickly and recover from mistakes seamlessly.
- SQL backups can be restored to a new database seamlessly, which can be done without granting users access to the SQL server itself. This is very useful for standing up test environments!
- We expect to be integrating Rubrik with an enterprise file storage system soon
- Rubrik has a strong data classification system in Polaris which we are building out to help us meet our compliance needs