Jones-Onslow EMC Boosts Efficiency and Performance with Rubrik
“Being a small IT shop, we needed something that was going to allow us to reduce costs, save time, and streamline our recovery process. We first heard of Rubrik from our trusted partner, eGroup, who came to us in a time of tremendous need and growth. They truly have made an effort to understand our business in order to provide the most effective solutions. That sort of relationship is hard to find nowadays and we value it immensely."
Business Transformation
With Rubrik’s management simplicity and automated workflows, Jones-Onslow EMC’s (JOEMC) IT team has increased operational efficiency and gained 26 days of additional productivity. The team is able to ensure customer data is available for technicians 24/7 while delivering new capabilities for enhanced customer service. Rubrik also allows JOEMC to easily demonstrate compliance with regulations like PCI and NERC.
Industry
- Utilities
The Challenge
- Multiple hours per week spent managing legacy solution
- Lengthy recoveries for critical applications
Results
- 90% reduction in backup management time (26 days per year of additional productivity back to the business)
- Near-zero RTOs
- 75% reduction in backup windows
JOEMC is a member-owned electric cooperative in eastern North Carolina, serving close to 75,000 members with safe, reliable, and affordable electric service. JOEMC is proud to serve residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural customers with uncompromised excellence in customer service, all while being committed to improving quality of life through community and civic involvement.
Andy Shepard, Assistant Vice President of Network Administration at JOEMC, manages the organization’s IT team, delivering application and network support for employees. “IT plays a critical role in maintaining our business operations and making sure we deliver the highest quality customer service,” said Shepard. “For the technicians out in the field, demand for new technologies is greater than ever. We have applications that allow the field to look at real-time data on customer service orders and the electrical grid for our co-op. We’re trying to get the back end infrastructure in place so that whenever those applications are needed, we’ll have them ready on-demand.”
“Being a small IT shop, we needed something that was going to allow us to reduce costs, save time, and streamline our recovery process. We first heard of Rubrik from our trusted partner, eGroup Enabling Technologies, who came to us in a time of tremendous need and growth. They truly have made an effort to understand our business in order to provide the most effective solutions. That sort of relationship is hard to find nowadays and we value it immensely,” said Shepard.
Keeping the Lights on With Fast Recoveries
JOEMC’s core application for customer service requests runs on an Oracle database. If a member happens to get a power outage and calls in for support, the request is logged in the database with information on the member’s location and the nature of their issue. “If our applications are down, then we can’t even create a work order to send someone for help. We would have to do some sort of manual process like calling someone over the radio and relaying an address — if we happened to know what it was. This would absolutely delay customer service and extend power outages for our members,” said Devin Costa, Senior Network Administrator.
With Rubrik, the team is able to not only ensure that customer data is available for technicians 24/7, but also to deliver new capabilities for enhanced customer service. “With Rubrik, we now have the backend infrastructure to see requests in real-time without having to go out and assess damage manually. During our annual hurricane season, our technicians will be able to make more advanced decisions on which areas and customers need to be addressed first. Rubrik provides us the tools we need to do our job more efficiently and get members’ electricity back up and running more quickly,” said Shepard.
Time Savings with Faster Backup and Recovery
One of the biggest challenges for Shepard and team was that time spent managing backups made it increasingly difficult to juggle all of the other tasks required to support the company. “For a lean IT team that’s responsible for data, storage, backups, security, networking, and applications, recouping hours a day is huge for allowing us to cover all of the other responsibilities on our plate. It adds up to a lot of impact over the course of a year,” said Shepard.
Recovering customer data with their legacy solution also proved to be an increasingly time-consuming process. “Our previous solution had several moving pieces, which made routine recoveries much more cumbersome than they should have been. What used to take 20-30 minutes, we can recover with Rubrik in about one minute. Rubrik has opened our eyes to how it can be a much simpler process. It just works!” said Costa.
Simplified Regulation Compliance and Reporting
“Every 6 months, we have auditors come in and spot check our backup completion, the recovery process, and secure retention of our customer data. As an electric co-op, it’s crucial that we demonstrate compliance with regulations like PCI and NERC,” said Shepard.
“Since Rubrik supports our entire environment, we’re able to provide our department heads with reports on each server that they’re responsible for. The reports detail the SLAs that are being applied and confirm that each server is meeting compliance requirements. This is beneficial because now our staff is alerted the instant that a backup fails or storage runway falls below a certain threshold. It gives us some self-assurance that our servers and applications are being properly protected every day. When an auditor comes in, we can easily demonstrate compliance,” said Shepard.
A Single Software Solution Across All Apps
JOEMC utilizes Rubrik to protect their 90% virtualized environment, including physical Windows hosts, SQL and Oracle databases, and NAS shares. Benefits include:
90% Management Time Savings: “We used to spend over an hour managing each of our legacy backup solutions every day. With Rubrik, we now spend less than an hour per week monitoring our environment.”
Near-Zero RTOs: “Our previous solution had several moving pieces, which made routine recoveries extremely cumbersome. What used to take 20-30 minutes, we can recover with Rubrik in about one minute.”
75% Backup Window Reduction In Backup Windows: “Our previous solutions had backup windows that would take up to 12 hours to complete. With Rubrik, that’s shrunk to 3 hours.”
Unified Management: “Our previous solution used to fragment management across our physical and virtual servers. Having two solutions to manage was becoming more and more difficult. Being able to use Rubrik as a single management solution for both physical and virtual servers was paramount for us.”
Plug and Play: “Rubrik’s support team was able to connect to VMware vCenter and discover our environment in under an hour. We went to lunch, came back, and were already protecting a few hosts. In less than 24 hours, we had full backups of our entire environment.”
Policy-Based Simplicity: “Rubrik gave us the accessibility to create SLAs for different groups of servers and applications. The auto-protect feature is also huge, since the VMs automatically inherit the policies as soon as they’re provisioned. We don’t have to sweat new deployments at all.”
Easy On-Ramp To Cloud: “We currently have a private cloud model, but have already begun discussions on how we can use Rubrik to strengthen our DR strategy with public cloud in the future.”
Seamless Integration with Nutanix: “The combination of Nutanix and Rubrik makes scaling our production and backup environments easier than ever. Most of our production is running on Nutanix HCI, so being able to integrate Rubrik in minutes was a huge boost for us.”
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