Railcar Pooling Company TTX Deploys Rubrik Cloud Data Management Platform

Rubrik, Inc. announced that TTX Company, North America’s rail car pooling provider, has deployed Rubrik’s data management platform.

TTX is replacing its fragmented legacy backup infrastructure with Rubrik’s all-in-one solution to solve backup performance issues, drive down cost and complexity, and scale to meet the backup and recovery demands of TTX’s growing business.

TTX owns, maintains and manages a fleet of more than 230,000 railcars used by the nine North American railroads that own TTX. By using TTX, the railroads save capital and operating costs, and benefit from the assurance of always having railcars when and where they are needed. TTX spends more than $600 million annually on maintenance, using a network of facilities spread across the US.

The movement of railcars is tracked by TTX’s proprietary unified fleet distribution application, which handles an average of more than a million messages per day. Ensuring access to applications like this, and protecting their data is essential to operations.

Finding a performing backup and recovery solution for TTX’s large databases and data warehouse had been a longstanding struggle, according to Chad Plemons, director of digital operations, TTX. He said his company had tried several products over the years with varying success, but in 2016 decided to standardize on Rubrik.

“We selected Rubrik as the single platform for all our data protection needs for both our structured and unstructured data,” Plemons said. “Rubrik is very straightforward to deploy and administer. And that’s exactly what we were looking for given our emphasis on simplicity. We don’t have the luxury of having a backup engineer on staff. Now, it’s a function every member of the infrastructure team can manage. The simplicity of performing file-level recoveries allows us to execute this through our support desks.“

Another key benefit, he added: “is that archiving to the cloud is a built-in capability of Rubrik. Our hybrid cloud strategy recognizes that some data belongs in the cloud and some on-premises. With Rubrik, we have the flexibility to utilize cost-effective public cloud storage for long-term data retention. What we put into the cloud can also be accessed instantly at a granular level via search.“

TTX has deployed the Rubrik solution in conjunction with its adoption of all-flash storage arrays from Pure Storage, Inc. for all its production applications.

“Pure and Rubrik are examples of how you expect things to work in the future,” adds Bruce Schinelli, VP and CIO, TTX. “These are solutions that function as tightly integrated pieces of your infrastructure, providing a lot of immediate value without a lot of work by your staff.“

Rubrik and Pure Storage offer management across a data fabric that spans on-premises and cloud through a joint solution of Rubrik Cloud Data Management and Pure Storage’s FlashArray and FlashBlade products.

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