In St. Paul, MN, University of St. Thomas Selects Rubrik and AWS

Rubrik, Inc. announced the University of St Thomas has simplified its data management operations, migrated to AWS, and achieved material backup performance improvements with its Cloud Data Management Platform.

The university is currently using Rubrik to manage and protect data across its 90% virtualized environment, in addition to physical SQL, Windows, and Linux.

Located in St. Paul, MN, the universityi the State’s largest private non-profit university with 10,000 full-time students. Prior to Rubrik, the University’s five-person IT infrastructure operations and applications team struggled with unreliable legacy products. Backups failed weekly and forced the team to dedicate large amounts of time to troubleshooting infrastructure issues.

“Prior to Rubrik, we were never confident that we could recover in a reasonable amount of time,” said Laura Thomas, senior. systems engineer, University of St. Thomas. “Identifying the problem and initiating recovery could take up to six hours. With Rubrik’s Google-like search, we can quickly find the data we need, and recovery is almost instantaneous.“

The university also turned to Rubrik and its cloud-native architecture to leverage AWS for data archival. Using Rubrik in conjunction with AWS was a simple process, and the IT team was able to move the initial workloads to the cloud. Retention policies are automated for production environments, with data residing on the appliance for three days before archiving to AWS.

“The University of St. Thomas is committed to a cloud-first strategy so Rubrik is a natural fit. After a thorough review process, we selected Rubrik over Commvault, EMC, and Veeam because we felt they would be best in terms of strengthening our DR strategy, had a solid reputation, and were fantastic to work with,” said Thomas. “Rubrik handles the syncing of backups and replication to AWS. With our backups in the cloud, we’ve been able o easily migrate them from one region to another. In the future, we hope to have 90% of our services in the cloud, and Rubrik will be an integral part of that.“

After deploying Rubrik’s cloud data management platform, the university has improved their backup and recovery capabilities and are realizing their goal of moving older infrastructure to the cloud.

Other benefits include: 

• 90%+ management time savings: The team spends less than an hour a month checking Rubrik.
• 90%+ increased backup performance: Backups took an entire day to complete with the team’s previous legacy solution, compared to an hour.
• 40% data center footprint reduction: Now that all backup technology is located in one appliance, the team reduced its data center footprint from 340U to 200U.
• Fast Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) recovery: Faced with a major problem, Rubrik enabled the recovery of all SCCM packages and restored system functionality.

“Aging legacy infrastructure cannot meet the data management needs of today’s leading universities,” said Arvind Nithrakashyap, CTO, Rubrik. “That’s why the University of St. Thomas chose Rubrik to modernize its data protection operations and migrate to AWS. Rubrik’s simple, easy-to-use Cloud Data Management Platform has allowed the University to accelerate its cloud journey while also backing up its remaining on-premises data.“

The university is evaluating Rubrik’s CloudOn feature to enable a stronger DR plan. It would allow the to spin up cloud instances in AWS while keeping costs to a minimum with a lightweight architecture.

Case study
Rubrik and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Journey