A guide to how Rubrik is suitable for any business and budget

Finding the best data protection system is often high up on the priority list for many IT professionals, yet it can be a tricky decision to make. How does a business work out which solution would best suit their needs? And once they've found the right one, will it be affordable and within budget? We believe that Rubrik holds the answers.

We want to help companies who are considering Rubrik to find out more about how it could be the viable, realistic choice for data backup, recovery and security. If you are wondering about the features and flexibility of Rubrik, then this guide will help you to get ahead with selecting the best option.

Chapter 1: Why choose Rubrik?

Chapter 2: Protection for Virtual Machines

Chapter 3: How Rubrik protects your physical applications, databases and operating systems

Chapter 4: What are your options with Rubrik?

Chapter 5: What is Rubrik as a Service?

Chapter 1: Why choose Rubrik?

For many companies, backup is a convoluted process, incorporating many different elements. There is always a possibility of backups failing or not performing correctly. This is because they’re built on old-fashioned technology and software that no longer fits today’s expectations.

Rubrik is a platform that orchestrates data for hybrid cloud enterprises, anytime, anywhere. It’s a simple solution with an all-in-one hyper converged scale-out appliance. Rubrik cleverly encompasses: 

• Backup
• Instant recovery
• Replication
• Search
• Analytics
• Archival
• Compliance
• Copy data management. 

These are all housed securely on premise and optional cloud. Rubrik has fantastic benefits and functionalities to create seamless integration with all databases and really is the premium product for a comprehensive service – taking worry away.

What are the costs and savings associated with Rubrik?

Rubrik offers tangible benefits – the ability to buy it as a single Capex purchase or Opex monthly fee (more on this later). There are no hidden extra costs for additional server agents, and no additional costs for hardware maintenance – your payments cover everything, no matter what the eventuality. 

Typically, businesses make 30-50% immediate hard savings when implementing Rubrik. This is achieved with a combination of aspects, including software convergence and reduction in management time.

Plus, by eliminating the complexity of multi-point legacy solutions, data center footprint can be reduced by up to 70%. 

What are the advantages of Rubrik?

Businesses will benefit from a range of fantastic features when they choose Rubrik, including:

Features

• Flash-optimised ingest: Minimise the impact on production, and eliminate application stun. Rubrik ingests large volumes of data rapidly by widening the number of parallel data streams processed.
• Scale-out deduplication: Expand storage efficiency with global deduplication across one infinitely scalable cluster.
• End-to-end encryption: Secure data with FIPS-certified hardware or software-based encryption. All data can be encrypted at-rest and in-flight, whether it is on premise, or in the cloud.
• Immutability for Ransomware: Protect backup data against Ransomware with native immutability.

Management

• Policy-based management and monitoring: Click to assign SLA policies to VMs, applications and databases. Just select the desired snapshot capture frequency, retention duration, and desired location. Manage all data through one responsive HTML5-based interface.
• Compliance reporting and alerts: Track SLA compliance, backup tasks, and system capacity. Get notified early on areas to troubleshoot.
• Intelligent log management: Automate log backups with policy-based management. Quickly recover from any point-in-time snapshots.
• Cloud: Use public or private cloud for long-term data retention, test/dev, or DR. For applications running in the public cloud, Rubrik offers cloud-native data protection.

Recovery

• Instant recovery: Quickly recover VMs and SQL by live mounting directly onto Rubrik without additional storage provisioning.
• Global real-time search: Instantly search for applications and files across all snapshots stored on-prem or in the cloud with suggested search results as you type.
• Point-in-time recovery: Find and recover the relevant point-in-time snapshot and apply transaction logs to restore back to the desired point for SQL databases.

Ransomware protection

• Detect anomalies: Leverage greater insights on suspicious activity to accelerate detection.
• Analyse threat impact: Prevent data loss with granular visibility, discovering which applications and files were impacted.
• Accelerate recovery: Reduce downtime by recovering affected servers with just a few clicks.

Ian Thompson, Assured Data Protection’s UK Head of Data Services explains why Rubrik is the ideal solution to update traditional backup methods: 

“Traditionally, you might have had a back-up server running some back-up software, maybe with tape drives or other back-up storage, and all the individual components were brought together to eventually give a solution that only half worked. Rubrik is a very simple, hyper converged back-up appliance which eliminates the need for all of these separate components.”

With so many moving parts, is it any wonder these out-dated methods don’t work effectively in a modern setting? But Rubrik is different. It will enhance the experience for most businesses, as Rob Mackle, Director and Co-Founder of Assured Data Protection, explains:

“A lot of businesses want Rubrik, especially where data really is their life – such as financial, legal, retail and public sector institutions – it’s critical to have a good backup and especially a fall-back recovery solution.”

Customer use case

Companies with a large client base across a large geographical area, who need to keep systems running smoothly will benefit from Rubrik. Andy Leopard, IT System Manager at Prater, oversees all the infrastructure and networking across their UK offices: 

“To ensure our business operations run smoothly, we have to keep our systems up and running 99.9% of the time. My team of six supports 500 users across the company’s entire UK group. Rubrik ensures that all our applications and data are available instantly across our offices and construction sites while providing immediate ROI from Capex and Opex savings.”

Chapter 2: Protection for Virtual Machines

The Rubrik product was initially designed for Virtual Machines (VMs), specifically VMWare. However, since its inception, Rubrik has become so much more than this, now integrating with multiple databases and applications, while maintaining its superior functionality with VMs. Rubrik fully supports all VM's including VMWare, Hyper-V and Acropolis AHV.

How does Rubrik protect VMs?

Virtual machine-level backups and single file restores happen out of business’ VMs and backups. This is a huge advantage for most companies because, traditionally, Virtual Machine backup had separate backups of all the files inside a VM, just in case the company wanted to bring back a separate file. This is the way many businesses still conduct their VM backups.

But imagine an updated solution where businesses can rapidly restore any individual file from inside a Virtual Machine to really simplify the process. This was one of the first features Rubrik developed, so is a mature part of the code and therefore offers a super-smooth experience for users.

Rubrik protection of VMs – the benefits

This is likely to be the first thing a business looks for in a backup product because over 80% of the data will probably be  virtual machine data. 

Ian Thompson, Assured Data Protection’s UK Head of Data Services explains what he likes about the Rubrik VM integration, having worked in recovery for many years:

“Rubrik is extremely reliable. I'm saying that with some confidence because I've worked in backup and disaster recovery for 20 years – I've never seen anything this reliable in terms of percentage success rate.”

Rubrik protects virtual machines at an individual, folder or host level. The beauty of Rubrik is that, even if a new VM is created, it'll just protect that one automatically, too. It's designed not to need visiting everyday, so in terms of management, this is a very low maintenance solution for organisations.

Customer use case

Businesses who have IT teams that spend large parts of their day manually retrieving data, or who have over-complicated systems could really benefit from Rubrik – Andy Leopard, IT System Manager at Prater explains how integration has benefited them:

“In the past, it was extremely difficult to retrieve a specific file, VM, or database when we needed it. Rubrik took our recovery times down from an hour to seconds. It made recovery simple, out-of-the-box and didn’t require any manual configuration.”

“What Rubrik does to backup virtual machines probably doesn't differ a great deal on the surface: it's how it uses its Live Mount feature to recover them that's mind blowing. 

It's the fact that you can back a server up but then restore it and have it back online within 30 seconds. That is incredible. And we know our customers use that because we monitor what's happening on our customers’ devices and we can see that they use it.”

Chapter 3: How Rubrik protects your physical applications, databases and operating systems

One of the most appealing things about Rubrik is that it can protect any data, including MS SQL Server, Windows/UNIX/Linux, NAS and SAP HANA.

Designed to be vendor-agnostic, Rubrik supports the leading operating systems, databases, hypervisors, clouds, and SaaS applications, including:

SQL databases

• Live Mounting for test/dev: Provision multiple point-in-time copies to developers in seconds. Automate test, iterate, and tear down workflows without provisioning additional storage.  
• Providing instant recovery: Deliver near-zero RTOs by live mounting SQL directly on Rubrik. Recover down to a single object or tablespace in seconds.
• Offering policy-driven automation: Eliminate painful scripting and job scheduling. Manage large-scale environments with one SLA policy engine.
• Automating database discovery: Rubrik automatically discovers all your Oracle and SQL clusters, hosts, databases, and instances.
• Delivering Incremental-forever backups: Rubrik delivers incremental-forever backups to drive capacity savings and network efficiencies.

SAP HANA databases

• Providing native integrations: Use existing backup and recovery workflows with Rubrik’s direct integration with SAP HANA Cockpit and Studio.  
• Policy-driven simplicity: Mobilze data to your cloud provider of choice for cost-effective long-term retention. Automate replication and cloud archival via Rubrik’s SLA policy engine.
• Data immutability: Defend against cyber attacks, such as Ransomware, with immutable snapshots built into the platform.
• Built for scale: For large-scale environments, Rubrik supports multi-host architecture and multi-tenant database container configuration.

Windows, UNIX and Linux

• Bare-metal recovery for Windows: In the event of a disaster, deliver full system recovery for Windows and migrate to any hypervisor or cloud instance. Quickly restore in-place with the operating system and critical data intact.
• Granular protection: Specify protection down to a folder or file and choose the level of inclusion and exclusion.
• Instant access: Instantly search for files with suggested search results as you type.
• End user restore with RBAC: Assign granular permissions to enable self-service access to database, Linux, and UNIX administrators.
• Self-managing architecture: Rubrik automatically updates all connectors on physical databases, servers, and hosts to save on operating costs.

Ian Thompson, Assured Data Protection’s UK Head of Data Services explains one of Rubrik’s most impressive database recovery features:

“One of the outstanding features of Rubrik is recovery – the recovery of the SQL side is particularly straightforward using Rubrik Live Mounts. This is a relatively new and advanced feature, where you don't have to restore the SQL database to be able to access the data within it.”

Customer use case

Anyone who is fearful about the amount of time it could take to get back on their feet, especially if it might affect the customer service, will benefit from Rubrik. As Riaz Ashruf, Infrastructure Manager at Richmond Housing Partnership says:

“Prior to Rubrik, I was concerned about lengthy downtime in the event of a system failure. Rubrik eliminated that fear completely. With Rubrik, you could restore a database in seconds. We also loved that it provided a single interface across all our applications. There wasn’t a single vendor that offered a comparable solution to Rubrik on the market.”

Where Rubrik differs is with its Live Mount functionality where it can actually spin the database up on Rubrik itself, present it to the SQL server, and then read the database data directly from Rubrik. This means the data doesn't have to be restored or moved around anywhere – that little bit of missing data can be put back where it was in minutes – as opposed to having to restore the entire server which takes hours. 

Customer use case

Any organisation with a large volume of databases which hold critical information, as well as anyone who’s already got SQL, will benefit from Rubrik. Recently Assured Data Protection worked with a large national insurance company who needed to update their backup solution.

Their incumbent solution was Veeam which was causing SQL degradation, or bad performance during backup. Rubrik eliminated “stun” – a process causing a customer’s SQL databases to perform poorly, which results in slow searches, for example: car insurance comparisons. This slow service was not an acceptable customer experience for the company to offer. 

Rob Mackle, Director and Co-Founder of Assured Data Protection commented:

“Speed was the key driver for this insurance company. SQL with Rubrik is so fast, so efficient, it meant their databases could continue to operate. Live Mount aids speed of recovery, so that when things do go wrong , it's able to recover quickly from that scenario.”

Chapter 4: What are your options with Rubrik?

There are three ways businesses can purchase Rubrik:

• Through AWS or Azure for cloud instances

• Direct with Rubrik, who will then choose the most suitable partner to work with

• With Assured Data Protection, who offer Capex and Opex options plus, Service or Self-manage

Depending on the business and budget, companies will have a preferred payment method. Business requirements change all the time, for example if you sign a three year contract, a lot can happen in IT during that time. Some businesses might choose a Capex model, but others don't have the full budget upfront so when technology moves on, it can mean further investment to improve their current solution. There are three options for purchasing Rubrik:

• Capex: The most traditional method, where the company owns the appliance outright.
• Opex: A more flexible option, both commercially and from a technical design, especially if the business needs a managed service.
• Hybrid: An option to buy the rights to the appliance at a later date, or buy upfront and pay for a managed service.

Some facts worth bearing in mind when deciding how to purchase Rubrik include minimum terabyte options, payment methods and who will implement the platform at the business.

If a business purchases direct from Rubrik, they will receive:

• A minimum 15TB option
• Capex or annual in advance payment model
• A suggested partner to work with to for installation with no managed service.

If a business purchases Rubrik from Assured Data Protection, they will receive: 

• A minimum 5TB option
• Flexible and affordable pay-as-you-grow model
• The option for ‘Rubrik as a Service’
• An option for Disaster Recovery as a Service
• The chance to consume through an Opex, Capex or Hybrid model.

Sometimes the right option for a business doesn’t only come down to payment options, but includes other factors, as Ian Thompson, Assured Data Protection’s UK Head of Data Services explains:

“The decision isn’t just a cost thing – sometimes it's the industry. Some industries have different expectations. Some like to keep things in house, some like to outsource. There's been a big shift in IT generally over the last five years with people insourcing, outsourcing, using cloud, not using cloud – people’s reasons for choosing one provider over another aren’t necessarily fixed.”  

Chapter 5: What is Rubrik as a Service?

Assured Data Protection's standard offering to businesses is to put the appliance on site and have a connection back to the Assured Data Protection team. At a minimal level, this means they can monitor the appliance and the hardware. Beyond that, Assured Data Protection can monitor backups in detail and respond to failed backups. Rubrik is a very reliable platform, but some companies may want to offload their entire backup solution, end to end, to a provider so that someone else remediates any issues. 

Assured Data Protection can go in at a granular level – it’s a tailored solution that suits the individual company’s needs, rather than trying to fit customers into a pre-existing package. As Rob Mackle, Director and Co-Founder of Assured Data Protection explains:

“Rubrik as a Service best suits companies who perhaps don’t have an enterprise budget, but want enterprise quality. It is ideal for businesses who know exactly what they want and want to pay for what they need, and not everything else.”

A high level of customer service 

 Assured Data Protection offers a service which puts the customer at the centre by managing:

• The backups status, monitoring how long it’s been since the backup last ran successfully.
• The DR readiness of any customer, to better understand how out of date a particular backup is.
• The review of whether a backup is offsite, and if it’s replicated to their data centre.

Ian Thompson, Assured DP’s UK Head of Data Services, explains how Assured Data Protection provides a remote service to businesses to take on as much responsibility as possible:

“We monitor the appliance 24/7, covering things like the power supplies, the hardware, the capacity. We can optionally monitor the status of the backups.” 

Right the way through, Assured Data Protection keeps a proactive eye on the equipment, the backups, the resources, and capacities. By proactively monitoring backups, businesses are able to improve their time management. Other advantages lie in choosing Rubrik as a Service, which Rob Mackle, Director and Co-Founder of Assured Data Protection, highlights:

“Businesses can recover the data they want and quickly. We're here to make sure this can happen through a service. Without the service, all of that backup admin and that strain, stress and pressure, goes on to the IT department and a lot don't want that pressure – they'd rather outsource it and have a contract with escalating service credits to do Backup as a Service for them.”

Even if a business doesn't have Disaster Recovery as a Service, they still have the Assured Data Protection support team for real-world help or advice. Assured Data Protection has the experience when it comes to data recovery and customers can call upon that anytime to help them with their appliance. 

Customer use case

One of Assured Data Protection's customers, a global financial services firm, lost their entire UK storage platform so took advantage of the managed service provided by Assured Data Protection to get back on track, fast. 

The company was relying heavily on backups – Assured Data Protection didn't just help with their backups, but rebuilt their entire network, storage, and domain controllers. Then they manually helped bring back the firm’s servers, one by one. It was a comprehensive service which enabled the company to continue business as usual within a matter of hours.

Conclusion

No matter the requirements of a business, whether the needs are to make backups more reliable, speed up recovery, save on costs, or save on management time, Rubrik can be tailored to suit any business.

Download our 'Infographic Guide to Rubrik' here