The University of Reading Chooses Rubrik for Fast Data Recovery and Integration with Microsoft Azure and Nutanix

Rubrik enables 90%+ faster data restores and 75% management time savings at leading UK university

LONDON and PALO ALTO, Calif., June 11, 2019 – Rubrik, the Cloud Data Management company, today announced it has been selected by the University of Reading to protect more than 90% of its environment including Microsoft SQL and Microsoft Exchange, as well as Nutanix and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines. Rubrik’s solution has already allowed the university to completely migrate off tape, archive to public cloud, and significantly speed up SQL data recovery.

The University of Reading is one of the United Kingdom’s leading research universities and has been in existence for more than 150 years. Its IT team, which supports over 18,000 students and 7,000 faculty members, underpins the entire teaching experience at the university. The department delivers a broad range of services such as providing email accounts, storing data and streaming lectures.

Having been restricted by a tape-centric legacy backup and recovery solution which was unable to protect all applications, the university wanted to shift to a different solution for reliable backup and much faster restore times, particularly for its user critical Microsoft Exchange environment. The team selected Rubrik for its speed, management simplicity and ability to support its Nutanix and Microsoft Hyper-V infrastructure.

With Rubrik’s Data Cloud Management Solution, the university has benefitted from:

· 90%+ faster restores: For example, Microsoft SQL restores that previously took one week are now completed in 30 seconds with Rubrik. Nutanix’s VM-centric snapshots also help to quickly restore data.

· 75% management time savings: Previously, the team spent four hours a day managing a backup solution which only protected 10% of its environment. They are now protecting 90% of their environment but spending less than an hour on daily management.

· 60% data reduction: Rubrik has maximised storage efficiency, leading the university to achieve 60% data reduction.

· Policy-based management: Rubrik’s automated SLA policy engine enables the team to ‘set it and forget it’, rather than having to schedule jobs.

· Global search for file-level restores: Rubrik’s intuitive search allows the university to perform point-in-time restores for recovery in seconds.

· Backup to the public cloud: Using Rubrik, the university has been able to completely migrate off tape and archive to Microsoft Azure. The team has already achieved significant cost savings with Azure and has automated long-term data retention with Rubrik’s cloud integration. This integration also makes it simple to retrieve any archived documents required to respond to Freedom of Information requests, which public universities are required to fulfil.

· Seamless integration: When Nutanix AHV is combined with Rubrik’s modern data management and backup capabilities, customers like the University of Reading can achieve faster and more reliable recoveries, flexible archival and DR to the public cloud, security, and automation at scale.

Comments on the news

Kevin Mortimer, Infrastructure Services Manager at the University of Reading, said: “Rubrik blew us away; other vendors were far too complicated. Rubrik and Nutanix have proven they can outperform other technologies—I can’t think of a better fit. Our previous solution could only backup around 10% of our environment, but Rubrik now protects 90% of our environment and will eventually capture everything. With its incremental-forever backups, we have considerably reduced our daily backup load and the integration with cloud couldn’t be easier.”

Martin Brown, Director of Western Europe at Rubrik, said: “As more and more UK organisations squeeze their budgets, IT departments all over the country are having to do more with less. The University of Reading needed a data management solution that could save them time and money, while delivering backups that they could rely on. With our Microsoft Azure and Nutanix integration, the University of Reading is now able to protect more than 90% of its environment.”

Jay Chitnis, Senior Director of Strategic Alliances at Nutanix, said: “We’re proud to have an alliance with Rubrik that is helping our customers increase their freedom of choice for their backup solutions in the data centre. The Rubrik solution natively backs up and recovers Nutanix environments so users can securely access data instantly, automate protection policies, and manage their workloads across multiple data centres and between public, private and edge clouds.”