Our client in this example is a large engineering firm with 19 offices and just over 3000 employees. They have two data centers and utilize 500+ guests on VMware for their production servers. The amount of data that needed to be protected for these systems was about 110 TB.
They had a legacy backup system for many years, but it was becoming less friendly due to older technology and the staff that managed it was no longer in that same role. It was doing the job but they found it difficult to administer nor restores easy.
Dataedge had a long history with this client and knew of our long experience in backup solutions. They asked if we would be able to recommend a product that would meet the goals of:
- Ease of management in daily operations
- Fast and easy restores at a virtual machine or file level
- Efficient replication of backup data to a secondary site
- Detailed reporting
- Ease of disaster recovery testing and application sandbox support
- No use tape for data storage
Our team at Dataedge found that the best solution for them would be based upon Rubrik, an appliance-based product that easily met all of their needs. Rubrik is a software-defined platform that unifies backup, instant recovery, replication, search, analytics, archival, compliance, and copy data management in one secure fabric across the data center and cloud.
The Backup Solution
Two Rubrik R3410 appliances were used for the solution, one for the primary site and one as a replication target at their DR location. This configuration easily completes their backups efficiently and replicates all data to the secondary site with minimal impact on bandwidth as only changes from each backup are sent.
Statistically across all companies, recovery of data is done most often at the file level. Rubrik facilitates this from within the web-based GUI but also provides for instant recovery of entire virtual machines. This recovery of the VM can be back to a datastore but can also be run directly from the Rubrik appliance with performance maintained at an acceptable level with a full 30,000 IOPS available.
Security and reliability requirements were met with the implementation of technologies of end to end AES-256 encryption, flexible key management, and erasure encoding as a part of the storage architecture. The management and reporting capabilities of the solution exceeded their expectations through the use of REST-ful API which is built into every level of the appliance as well as the centralized compliance reporting features.
