Rubrik Agent Cloud

I use Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct as an AI-based backup product. Rubrik recently introduced AI technology into it. We use it to back up all of our workloads. These workloads can be VMware virtual workloads, physical workloads, NAS, databases such as SQL and Oracle, or AWS and Azure workloads. We back up all of these workloads with Rubrik on a day-to-day basis, and we make sure that the data we back up is encrypted. We store and retain the data in an isolated environment so that it is air-gapped and no bad actors can get into it.

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct has a lot of new features compared to other technologies, for example Dell. Dell used to be the king of the data protection market, but over the past few years Rubrik, Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct, and Cohesity have come into the picture and totally dominated the market. For example, the time it takes to back up workloads, such as virtual workloads, is shorter, and the process is easy. With Dell, we used to use proxies. Rubrik offers proxy-less backups, so there is no need to deploy any proxy server in the virtual environment to back up data. That is one of my favorite features. Rubrik is also spending more of its budget on Rubrik AI nowadays. They are still working on it, but I like the concept of what they are doing. They want to develop Rubrik AI so that users can ask it questions and it will answer all of their queries. That is also one of my favorite features in Rubrik. Restores are also pretty fast compared to other tools, and they are very simple, requiring just one or two clicks. Even inexperienced people can understand it. If we bring in a fresher or someone with two or three years of experience and train them, they can easily adapt to the technology. That is what I like about Rubrik.

Data deduplication is pretty good. Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct uses inline deduplication, and the compression and deduplication are pretty good. The software itself has the feature, but it is also part of the price model. It is an inbuilt feature. With this feature, the main benefit is that backups are faster, and NAS backups are much faster. That is the main concept of Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct: to make NAS backups faster. Compared to the traditional way of doing backups, Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct gives us a faster way of doing both backups and restores. That is the main concept behind it.

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is good. It is pretty user-friendly, and I do not think it requires any improvements in that area. We can simply configure NAS backups by using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct. There is an option called NAS Cloud Direct in RSC, which is Rubrik Security Cloud. When we go to the inventory drop-down in RSC, we see the NAS Cloud Direct option. From there, we launch the app or the wizard. Once the wizard is launched, we give the credentials of the NAS in the cloud, which can be in either AWS or Azure. We give the credentials of the NAS system. If it is a NetApp system, we give the ID and password for the vserver or the NetApp cluster name. Once we do that, the NAS gets mapped through RSC. We are not deploying anything in the cloud, so there is no need for extra servers and no extra pricing. We just map the whole NAS system to the existing RSC and start backing up. That is how the Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct feature works. With the traditional approach, we have to deploy a NAS cluster, which is a virtual cluster, in the cloud and back up through it. That might require more effort and time, and that is how Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct differs from the traditional approach.

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct integrates well with other services. We simply map to RSC, so it is pretty flexible and compatible with all other services. It is not a big deal, and we have never encountered any issues mapping it to different services. We use NetApp and Dell, and both are pretty flexible. We did not have any issues using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct with them. Those are the two services we have mapped with Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct so far.

Not only Rubrik, but all backup technologies are Incremental Forever now. There are two concepts, full backup and incremental backup. Any backup that we take for the first time is called the full backup, and it takes much longer. For example, if I back up a server or a laptop that holds around 100GB, the first backup might take a couple of hours, but the second backup might take only five minutes. That difference is called Incremental Forever. It only backs up the changes since the full backup. The system retains the first full copy, and from then on it only backs up the changes, which are called incrementals. That is pretty good, and it is how all backups work nowadays. It is easy, more flexible, more compatible, and very easy to manage.

Rubrik is one of the leading technologies in the market, but we still have legacy technologies such as NetBackup, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, and Dell Avamar. Rubrik probably needs to overtake all of these tools so that it can do well in the market.

For example, one roadblock is that sometimes the page hangs. The Rubrik UI, and specifically RSC, gets hung. RSC, which stands for Rubrik Security Cloud, is a centralized tool where we manage all of our backups. Sometimes the user interface hangs, or we have a hard time interacting between the user interfaces within RSC. When this happens, we need to reach out to customer service. That is one of the areas where I ask the Rubrik vendor to improve.

Rubrik also needs to ingest more workloads down the line. For example, NetBackup can back up around 120 workloads, and I do not think Rubrik can do that. Rubrik needs to ingest more workloads so that we can back up most of what we need. Customers might come up with something new day to day, and we have many thousands of tools and applications right now that need to be backed up. That is how we can declare any tool an enterprise technology. I do not think Rubrik has fully matured yet. It is only seven, eight, or maybe 10 years old, not 20 or 30 years old.

For example, Cohesity did something smart. They recently bought NetBackup, and Cohesity is the biggest competitor of Rubrik. Cohesity bought NetBackup so that it could ingest all of its features and improve its market position. I do not think Rubrik has bought anyone recently, and that is something they need to try in a smart way so that they can have more features.

I have used Rubrik for maybe more than five years now.

Stability is good, but it is a computer, not a human, and even a computer can make mistakes. Even AI makes mistakes. If I use ChatGPT, it gives me the wrong information 30% of the time, and it even declares by itself that it could be wrong. Rubrik is a relatively small product, so it can make mistakes, which is not a big deal. However, they need some improvements in that area.

Regarding performance issues, as I mentioned, RSC sometimes hangs. That is one of the issues I have encountered in my experience, possibly because of load. We have to call support. Sometimes all the workloads disappear. When we open the RSC UI, we do not see anything in there. We have to call them to ask what is going on, and they have to bring everything back. We have encountered these silly issues a few times. Overall, performance is good, but they have to improve in a few areas.

I contacted them. I opened a ticket and also called them.

Support is pretty good, but sometimes we have longer wait times when I call because they might be talking to different customers. When I open a ticket, they jump on it quickly and help us. Sometimes it is time-consuming, though, and they need to improve that part as well. I think they need to hire more professional engineers. Sometimes one engineer is assigned more cases and is involved with different customers and different cases, so we sometimes get a delayed response. The engineer might also be working in parallel with multiple teams and customers, so he needs to focus on other work as well. That is the area where they need to improve.

Support is good. I can give it an eight.

Rubrik is an appliance, not a simple server. With simple software such as Word, you can install it by yourself by reading the steps and following the procedures, but this is not like that. The customer cannot do the initial setup alone, and we need help from Rubrik because of the hardware part. Rubrik ships the hardware to us initially. Once it arrives at the data center, our data center team racks and stacks it. After that is done, the Rubrik engineering team or their site engineers come into the picture and do pretty much all of the remaining work. The customer cannot do the initial setup themselves and needs help from Rubrik for the hardware part.

For the virtual edition or the cloud edition, we can deploy it ourselves with simple steps and simple software. When it comes to the hardware, however, setting up the initial hardware and all of the networking and cabling requires help from multiple people. The customer cannot do it by themselves.

Pricing is costly. Rubrik is a hyperscale platform, which means the software and the hardware all run on the same platform, so the pricing is a little high. They should probably provide more discounts to customers who are willing to use Rubrik. Right now, the price is based on how much data we protect, and that is one of the licenses we have. It is also based on the number of servers or on the amount of data we protect on a day-to-day basis. That needs to be improved a little bit.

Maintenance is required. We check the regular alerts, and if we get any hardware alerts, we need to clear them from our side on a regular basis. The alerts also go to the Rubrik vendor. From our side, it is low maintenance compared to other tools, and the maintenance is not that high. We just check the alerts, and that is it. If there are any hardware failures, the hardware gets replaced. Apart from that, I do not think there is any other maintenance, and what there is is basic. Only once in three or four years do we do a whole replacement of the hardware. That is a big maintenance task, but it mainly comes after three or four years, once the hardware license has expired or we need to replace the whole hardware. The regular maintenance activities are basic and not that high.

Overall, I cannot say ten out of ten, but I can give it an eight, somewhere between 7.5 and eight.