Rubrik vs Veeam - management wants to switch - are their arguments valid?

[omegagx]

We have a meeting with Rubrik engineers tomorrow. They are claiming that their product is significantly cheaper than Veeam due to the way they do Azure cloud backups. Here's what they sent us. Is this correct? Are they making a valid point?

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I wanted to share a cost analysis/breakdown on cloud consumption costs with Rubrik vs. Veeam. One of Rubrik's biggest differentiators in the market is its ability to natively write data to cloud in an incremental forever methodology.

Veeam's architecture requires periodic fulls to be written to cloud (monthly & yearly) which drives up cloud storage costs as outlined below. The software performs a "synthetic full" on the incremental chain in the cloud, which creates a "full point" to recover from. Without the synthetic full, they would have to crawl through every incremental backup to retrieve necessary blocks to recover the data. Rubrik writes the data to cloud natively in our own file format with the ability to recover data from any point-in-time from the cloud. Net/net the cloud storage requirement for Veeam is significantly more than what is required with Rubrik.

More details on Veeam's backup methodology are outlined on their website here:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... l?ver=95u4

Below is a cost analysis/breakdown that outlines the cloud cost savings with Rubrik. To keep things apples-to-apples we assumed 2.5X data reduction, 30 Recovery Points, 12 Monthly's, 3 Annuals in both scenarios. Cloud bucket is Azure Cool Blob US East - General Purpose V1 @ $24.58/TB

Veeam: Total Source Data - 52 TB
Veeam Data Reduction - 2.5X, 30 Recovery Points, 12 Monthly's, 3 Annuals
Source Data 1st Month 1st Year TB's 2nd Year TB's 3rd Year TB's
52 27.04 278.72 301.60 326.77
Note - Veeam will upload monthly and annual full backups

Azure Resource Monthly Cost Year 1 Cost Year 2 Cost Year 3 Cost
Azure Cool Blob Storage $665 $6,851 $7,413 $8,032
$24.58/TB - US East - General Purpose V1
Total Annual Cost $6,851 $7,413 $8,032
3 Year Azure TCO $22,296
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Rubrik: Total Source Data - 52 TB
Rubrik Data Reduction - 2.5X, 30 Daily's, 12 Monthly's, 3 Annuals
Source Data 1st Month 1st Year TB's 2nd Year TB's 3rd Year TB's
52 27.04 37.86 68.20 87.30
Note - Rubrik uploads incremental forever backups (based on 1% monthly change)

Azure Resource Monthly Cost Year 1 Cost Year 2 Cost Year 3 Cost
Azure Cool Blob Storage $665 $931 $1,676 $2,146
$24.58/TB - US East - General Purpose V1
Total Annual Cost $931 $1,676 $2,146
3 Year Azure TCO $4,753


3 Year Savings $17,544
% Savings 79%

The solution can upload data to Azure/AWS cheaper than Veeam. Everything is written natively in an incremental forever approach. Veeam has to upload periodic fills which drive up storage cost.

[omegagx]

Additionally, they are making the following claims

1)Deduplication

Rubrik:
Rubrik follows incremental forever methodology with global de-duplication
across the cluster, which reduces the amount of data written to backend
storage and cloud archive target.

Veeam:
Veeam’s de-duplication is object based, which increases storage requirements on
the backend and redundant data being written with every Job (both on-prem and
cloud)

2) Microsoft SQL

Rubrik:
Full SQL and transaction log protection via Rubrik connector. Live Mount of
databases for instant DB access, QA/dev, and granular recovery via gui or API
call. Recently added a filter driver for faster incremental backups. Each
appliance can service 30k IOPS for faster Dev/UAT refresh.

Veeam:
Databases are discovered automatically. Backed up from either physical or virtual
machines, and be restored anywhere. Veeam can instantly recover the VM but not
the SQL DB. No orchestrated or automated live mount recovery for DBA’s. Granular
item recovery is supported up to the table, schema or configuration of disk target is
bottlenecked by media server. All recoveries must go through media agent which
will hinder performance of backend storage.

3) Cloud

Rubrik:
Able to tier to Azure, AWS, GCP all natively and in an incremental forever
methodology.
CloudOn converts workloads to usable images in the cloud. They also provide Cloud
Cluster which is their ability to run a sw only version in the cloud to protect
production and cloud born workloads. CloudOn works with Azure and AWS.

Veeam:
Multiple ways to do cloud tiering. The lift & shift method can be implemented
in any cloud, whether private or public, but quickly gets complicated and is not
cost-effective. The Cloud Tier capability is an equivalent of CloudOut. Azure,
AWS, IBM Cloud and S3-compatible private object storage are supported.
Veeam requires periodic writing of Full backup copy to the cloud.

Protection of Cloud workloads is done with their Agents (for Windows or
Linux), and managed either by Veeam Backup & Replication deployed in the
cloud or the Veeam Availability Console, except for EC2 instances which are
supported natively (with EBS snapshots) through N2WS.

[bdufour]

i wouldnt feel comfortable with a fwd incremental chain without some sort of syn or full backup periodically to protect against data corruption on long incremental chains and also restore times...

[anthonyspiteri79]

Hey Michael... I can't even really begin to break down this FUD, because almost all of it is incorrect.

It's actually amazing that a competitor would openly lie and deceive at this level. It's actually an eye opener for me and proves that Rubrik will manipulate potential customers to get a sale.

I think the best thing to do is email your local SE/SA and get them to respond in turn to the comparisons. Would that be possible? Otherwise we will look to respond where appropriate.

Again... I actually can't believe what was written by Rubrik. The level of deception is amazing!

[DarthDave]

Today (while on vacation in snowy Colorado for the boy's master's graduation), is my 1 year anniversary at Veeam. This is my first post on the Veeam Forums, but I felt compelled to respond...

For a period of 5 days, I was going to leave Gartner and join Rubrik. It became clear to me, my wife, and even the very same boy, who was home from undergrad finals, that the lack of ethics @ Rubrik were *not* something that after being in the backup industry for almost 3 decades that I could tolerate, much less expose my family too.

In the last year, I have heard many Rubrik claims and statements. The only thing that I would say, not as a Veeam employee, but as a human, is *fact check* and then make an informed decision.

[Gostev]

Veeam's architecture requires periodic fulls to be written to cloud (monthly & yearly) which drives up cloud storage costs as outlined below.

What a shameless liars.

The software performs a "synthetic full" on the incremental chain in the cloud, which creates a "full point" to recover from.

That would be a totally dumb thing to do with object storage, so of course we don't do this. There's not even a notion of "backup files" or "incremental chains" with object storage in the first place, since there's no file system! How are they even coming up with this random nonsense?

Sounds like they are desperate. No wonder - I see on LinkedIn that quite a few people leaving Rubrik lately. Sounds like all the investment money are gone and the party is over?

[bdufour]

ive actually lost a lot of respect for managers in the past that i thought were really bright, bc they always fell for what my dad and i call the 'consultant effect.' basically, they get manipulated and deceived into buying products that suck bc the vendor/consultant had a good sales pitch. sadly, as unethical as some of these vendors may be, there's blame to place on management for wanting to jump ship to save a nickle without critically thinking about what it is theyre actually doing.. in the future, only those with technical knowledge will be involved in decision making.

[omegagx]

Our Veeam renewal is in 10 days and Rubrik is trying very heard to replace Veeam.

[csydas]

I can answer some of these even...basically, beware of Trojans bearing gifts there pal.

Veeam's architecture requires periodic fulls to be written to cloud (monthly & yearly) which drives up cloud storage costs as outlined below. The software performs a "synthetic full" on the incremental chain in the cloud, which creates a "full point" to recover from. Without the synthetic full, they would have to crawl through every incremental backup to retrieve necessary blocks to recover the data.

AFAIK, Veeam cannot even perform its synthetic operations in S3 storages. On it's own Cloud Connect, yes, but that's on a per provider basis, so it's not the same as storing data up in AWS or Azure. The links Rubrik includes even refute their own statement. I'm not even sure the numbers are worth breaking down.

Below is a cost analysis/breakdown that outlines the cloud cost savings with Rubrik. To keep things apples-to-apples we assumed 2.5X data reduction, 30 Recovery Points, 12 Monthly's, 3 Annuals in both scenarios. Cloud bucket is Azure Cool Blob US East - General Purpose V1 @ $24.58/TB

The solution can upload data to Azure/AWS cheaper than Veeam. Everything is written natively in an incremental forever approach. Veeam has to upload periodic fills [sic] which drive up storage cost.

The [sic] alone should tell you what you're dealing with. Their copy pasta is even poor.

[anthonyspiteri79]

Our Veeam renewal is in 10 days and Rubrik is trying very heard to replace Veeam.

Is there anything that you need from us in order to stop management making a misinformed decision based on the deception from Rubrik??

[Rumple]

We have a meeting with Rubrik engineers tomorrow. They are claiming that their product is significantly cheaper than Veeam due to the way they do Azure cloud backups. Here's what they sent us. Is this correct? Are they making a valid point?

I have a client who went to rubrik. They are now trying to figure out how to deal with a $6000/month backup cost. Of course this is an enterprise, but its still sounds as if it completely blew their budget expectations.
Personal, as an enterprise, it still shocks me they would use Azure storage vs tapes....an LTO tape library and Tape costs will still be significantly cheaper then azure storage when you have 7 year retention.

Now of course, when you are backing up to something like Backblaze where the costs are .005 cents per gb that's a different story (and yes, that's 1/2 cent per gb....)