TV 2 Ensures On-Time Broadcasting and Reliability with Rubrik

Headquartered in Bergen, Norway, TV 2 is Norway’s largest commercial media house and leading public service broadcaster. Operating 8 TV-channels that broadcast an array of content for diverse target groups, and one of Norway’s largest news websites, TV 2 services over 1.5 million viewers on a daily basis. 

With the need to have services running around the clock, the IT team plays a critical role in ensuring business continuity and properly timed air coverage of broadcasting shows. TV 2’s IT team carries the responsibility to make sure the technical services in the background are consistently running without failure. With an IT strategy of continuously challenging their environment and making processes more efficient, Ståle and the team undertook the task to pursue a solution that allowed them to optimize their on-prem VMware backups, as well as maximizing efficiency on the level of micro services. 

SADDLED WITH CUMBERSOME LEGACY SOLUTION 

Prior to Rubrik and facing the technologically slow-adapting field of broadcasting, TV 2 was saddled with a legacy solution that was becoming increasingly costly and complex to manage.

While we maintain a tape archive for our large video archive, we wanted to ensure that our mission-critical applications were readily available and properly backed up, said Ståle Martinussen, Senior IT Architect.

 

“We struggled with this with our legacy solution as it required a backup agent in every machine, increased the load on the public network trunks, and performed lengthy backups with unreliable availability. There could be VMs popping up without a backup client. We were simply spending too much time administering and maintaining a system that didn’t allow us to fully pursue our goals.”

With Rubrik, TV 2 embraces a system that fast-tracks them to their goals.

“Our goal has always been to make everything as efficient as possible while focusing on the micro-services instead of the big tasks. Rubrik has allowed us to do that,” said Ståle.  “We don’t have to spend hours managing Rubrik because it does what it says. We simply installed it, assigned the SLAs, and practically forgot about it.”

“We have also embraced more automated approaches as Rubrik supports agentless backups. We don’t have to deal with having a backup agent in every machine, and we can now reap the benefits of immediate backups and reliable availability of all mission-critical applications.” 

A FUTURE WITH HYBRID CLOUD 

“In the media industry, large video files and complex fileflows makes it challenging to virtualize and combine public cloud services with on-prem systems” said André Nordhuus, Senior IT Consultant. “We are continuously looking at consuming new services and systems in the cloud and on-prem, and will look at using Rubrik for public cloud services as well – e.g. Office 365.” 

TV 2 protect mission-critical applications with Rubrik, additional benefits include: 

Near-zero RTOs

Our restores used to take anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour, but now they’re done immediately — it’s an elegant and efficient process.

World-class support

Rubrik’s support has been great. They go above and beyond to follow up with us every day when we have any cases open with them. Our issues were solved within 1 day, but they continue to monitor our system for at least 3 to 4 days after.

Ease of use

While our previous solution required a lot more management and maintenance, Rubrik has allowed us to take time back in our day. The Rubrik user experience has been a lot simpler and straightforward. At this point, we spend very little time managing Rubrik on a day-to-day basis.

Policy-driven management

We simply set the SLAs and the rest falls in line — the system does a great job maintaining itself, otherwise it would let us know.

Future-proof

Our goal for the future is to have a bullet-proof system, a system where human failures don’t affect our backups. We believe Rubrik will get us there.

Streamlined Upgrades

Upgrades with our legacy solution used to be an extremely time-consuming process. With Rubrik, it’s a tremendous improvement. It’s painless and the Rubrik support team handles all of it.

SQL Server Backups

We’re have been dedicating time towards testing SQL backups recently, and that near-continuous backup approach is noticeably smoother and superior compared to backing up to local disk and then to tape. 

Learn more about Rubrik…