The City of Stavanger Consolidates Data Management and Gains 104 Days of Productivity with Rubrik

 Stavanger is Norway’s fourth most populous city and was founded in 1125. Stavanger is the administrative center of Rogaland County and has a population of 134,399 (as of Q2 2019). The city is known as the Norwegian oil and gas capital, as well as one of the most innovative regions in Norway. 

Jo Øiongen is a Senior Consultant for the Stavanger’s IT department, which comprises about 50 professionals serving approximately 20,000 users.

“For Stavanger, IT is critically important in supporting an expansive variety of daily services for citizens, including schools, public safety and utilities,” said Øiongen. “We consider ourselves a “smart city” and take advantage of technologies like IoT to deliver intelligent services to our residents. Having a robust data management solution is essential to our ability to maintain uptime and recover quickly in case anything were to happen. With Rubrik, we have peace of mind that our city’s data is protected.” 

FRUSTRATION WITH AGING LEGACY INFRASTRUCTURE AND SUBPAR PERFORMANCE 

“Prior to Rubrik, we were using two different legacy solutions for data management. These products were not aging well, in particular, a system that backed up to tape. Both solutions were complicated to use, which meant we were spending far too much time administering them,” said Øiongen.

“Additionally, we experienced issues completing our full backups, which would typically run once a week during the weekend. These backups would often not finish by Monday morning, and we lacked confidence that our data was 100% protected.” 

Stavanger’s IT team decided it was imperative to switch to a modern data management solution, and evaluated many different vendors during their search. “Our criteria was that the product had to be easy to administer, supported a wide variety of systems and virtual environments, and offered a robust API for future automation,” said Øiongen. 

SIGNIFICANT TIME SAVINGS AND NEAR-ZERO RTOS WITH RUBRIK 

“Rubrik has freed up the team to spend their time on more value-added tasks,” said Øiongen. “The reduced administrative overhead has enabled us to make better use of our existing resources. With Rubrik, we now have an easy way to verify our data is fully protected, cutting down time spent on verifying backups.” 

“Our restore process has also been significantly improved by Rubrik,” said Øiongen. “The old system was complicated, time-consuming, and relied on tapes to recover our data. Rubrik’s Google-like search makes it a simple matter to restore individual files. We are extremely pleased with the ability to restore VMs in seconds and to replicate SQL databases with Live Mount without impacting production systems.” 

Benefits include: 

90%+ management time savings (104 days of additional productivity):

• Previously, we had three people spending 15-20 hours (in total) each week managing our backups. We now have one person spending between 5 to 15 minutes a day checking Rubrik, which is a dramatic savings of time. As a result, Rubrik has given us back 104 days of productivity in a year, allowing us to utilize our existing resources and team more efficiently.

Near-zero RTOs

• With our legacy infrastructure, restores for files and databases could take anywhere from an hour to a day, especially if we had to go searching for tapes. We also sought assistance from external consultants a few times a year for issues with restores. Now, we can restore VMs, files, and databases in seconds with Rubrik. With Live Mount, we can clone a database and extract data quickly without affecting production.

Significantly improved backup performance

• Our backups used to exceed our 48-hour windows, but with Rubrik, they’re completed in 4-5 hours.

90% reduction in data center footprint

• With Rubrik, we have reduced our data center footprint from 60U to 6U.

World-class support

• We have been nothing short of impressed by Rubrik’s support team; they are all true professionals and respond quickly to any questions that arise.

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