Cranfield University Chooses Rubrik for Disaster Recovery to the Cloud and Simplified Data Management

Overview

Cranfield University, a British postgraduate university, is a global leader for education and transformational research in technology and management. Every year, Cranfield University delivers academic courses in 50 countries outside of the UK and executive development to over 15,000 people. Cranfield is one of the UK’s top five commercial research-intensive universities.

Edward Poll, Head of IT Infrastructure, is responsible for aligning the IT infrastructure strategy with business objectives. Poll oversees a team of 13 that supports the university’s 1,600 staff and 4,000 postgraduate students. “As a leading global research institution, demand for agile services from our users is continuously increasing. We need forward-thinking technology within our infrastructure,” said Poll. “Since Rubrik is software converged and built on an API-first architecture, we receive hands-free management and automated orchestration, providing DevOps-like functionality while minimizing downtime.”

Solutions

Fast track to cloud modernization wih Rubrik

Cloud is top of mind for IT at Cranfield University, especially for disaster recovery. “Our goal is to leverage the agility and cost savings of cloud infrastructure. Previously, we were replicating to a third-party host. A weakness of this approach was that if our two on-site resilient datacentres were completely down, we had no easy way to fully restore services from our third-party provider,” said Poll. “We are making a push to cloud backup because it’s cheaper than our current third-party provider, replaces costly hardware and software on-prem, and provides greater resilience. Rubrik’s easy integration with cloud helps us achieve cloud savings today, all whilst building future cloud infrastructure for disaster recovery.”

The Challenge: “With our previous vendor, migrating to the cloud required building an entirely different infrastructure. That would have taken weeks to configure. Additionally, it meant an entirely siloed architecture to manage our cloud workloads, which would result in greater costs, complex management, and slower recovery.” 

The Solution: “Rubrik delivered an all-in-one solution for data archival and disaster recovery to cloud. It easily integrated with Azure for simpler, faster, and cheaper backup, recovery, and cloud archival.” 

• Avoid cloud vendor lock-in: “A huge advantage with Rubrik is that it’s built to be vendoragnostic from the get-go. As we grow, we can choose from any public and private cloud provider and easily move workloads from cloud to cloud.”
• Fast recovery in the cloud: “With Rubrik, we can restore in the cloud. Using their Google-like search, we can quickly find our data in the cloud and recover in a matter of minutes.”
• Cost savings: “Rubrik seamlessly integrated with Azure for data archival. By replicating off-site to Azure, we cut our costs. Our strategy moving forward is to reduce our on-prem footprint.”
• Rubrik CloudOn for disaster recovery to the cloud: “Disaster recovery is increasingly top of mind. Rubrik has pioneered CloudOn, an innovative feature for cloud instantiation. We plan on using Rubrik CloudOn in Azure to enable stronger disaster recovery. Our strategy is to build an infrastructure where we can replicate directly to the cloud and then use Rubrik CloudOn to instantly spin up workloads in the cloud. This will allow for business continuity in the event of a disaster. If our on-prem site is down, we can quickly convert our archived VMs into cloud instances, and launch those apps on-demand in Azure.”

Management simplicity and fast point-in-time recovery for oracle RMAN

A key reason Cranfield University chose Rubrik was for its Oracle RMAN integration. “One of the biggest advantages with Rubrik over legacy solutions is its policy-based management for Oracle RMAN workloads. Rubrik delivers the same simple user experience across our legacy, virtual, and cloud workloads.”

• 83% management time savings with SLA policy automation: “The legacy approach required time-consuming, manual day-to-day management. With Rubrik, we eliminate tedious backup job scheduling. The same SLA policies apply to Oracle workloads as for our other datasets. Rubrik handles backup retention, replication, and archival from one policy engine. As a result, we spend 83% less time on managing our backups.”
• Incremental-forever backups fast point-in-time recovery: “Previously, we would take snapshots of entire VMs and then export daily Oracle backups every night. Point-in-time recovery was only available for a day, and then we had to revert back to daily snapshots. With incremental-forever backups and log management, we can apply transaction logs to restore back from the desired point. As a result, we have greatly reduced our RTOs while also increasing capacity savings.”
• Immutable backups for secure data management: “Rubrik always stores data in an immutable format, ensuring that we are secure from potential malware threats.”