America’s Test Kitchen Utilizes Rubrik to Accelerate Media Digitization & Unlock Multi-Cloud Data Control

32

Days of additional productivity back to the business

RTOs

Near-zero RTOs

Significant

Reduction in backup management time (hrs to mins)

Overview

America’s Test Kitchen (ATK), founded in 2001, is an independent media company that has earned the respect of the publishing industry, the culinary world, and most importantly, millions of home cooks. Creator of PBS’ beloved cooking shows, America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Country, and publisher of Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country magazines, the brand also produces cookbooks, podcasts, and websites, offering recipes, equipment and ingredient reviews, and tips. ATK’s publications do not contain advertising, and the company prides itself on continuing to deliver unbiased and objective content.

Dustin Brandt is the Director of IT. “At ATK, IT is vital in everything we do–from hosting America’s Test Kitchen, to airing podcasts, to delivering the websites. Our services need to be available and secure to our employees and consumers at all times,” said Brandt. “As a lean team, we naturally have to be jacks of all trades, so it is critical for us to partner with best-of-breed technologies like Rubrik.”

Our services need to be available and secure to our employees and consumers at all times. As a lean team, we naturally have to be jacks of all trades, so it is critical for us to partner with best-of-breed technologies like Rubrik.

Dustin Brandt
Director of IT

Featured Product: Rubrik Cloud Data Management

Challenges

Management complexity from daily maintenance
Lengthy, unreliable recovery process
Inability to implement a hybrid cloud strategy

Results

Significant reduction in backup management time (from 5-6 hours per week to minutes)
32 days of additional productivity back to the business
Seamless hybrid multi-cloud archival to AWS and GCP
Near-zero RTOs

Business Transformation

ATK gained 32 days per year of added productivity
Freeing up time to focus on improving employee efficiency and consumer experience
ATK accelerated key digitization efforts and achieved multi-cloud data control

Challenges

Fast track to hybrid cloud

ATK’s 2017 relocation to a new office and production headquarters in Boston’s Seaport district was a prime opportunity for Brandt and team to rethink their legacy IT infrastructure. “As we moved to our new facility, we needed to turn over a new leaf. We were determined to overhaul our entire IT infrastructure with the mission to modernize, consolidate, and stabilize. We wanted to scale back on the multiple vendors and manufacturers that we were using and look holistically at finding administrative efficiencies for infrastructure management, while at the same time pushing our operational capacity and performance forward,” said Brandt.

As a publishing company, the speed at which content is delivered is critical to the success of ATK. “We had our beginnings in traditional print operations, and so a lot of our tools are print-driven. But to thrive in the 21st century, we needed to make our production methodologies more channel-agnostic and agile to more efficiently scale how we deliver content to our consumers,” said Brandt. “Our digital transformation is about moving the needle on content delivery and content production. We want all of our assets digitized and readily available. Part of that strategy is to expand our infrastructure into the cloud, taking a hybrid, best-of-breed approach to introduce new elements like Rubrik into our infrastructure as we retire legacy tools.”

We wanted to scale back on the multiple vendors and manufacturers that we were using and look holistically at finding administrative efficiencies for infrastructure management, while at the same time pushing our operational capacity and performance forward.

Dustin Brandt
Director of IT

Solutions

Digital transformation enabled by native NAS protection

Over the past two decades, ATK’s NAS file systems have grown to include large multimedia files like videos, podcasts, and images. The sheer size of NAS and the variety of content made backups extremely difficult. Orchestrating archives to a public cloud was identified early as a business imperative, in order to ensure the assets could be readily available for editors, developers, test cooks, and producers in the event of any issue.

“Before Rubrik, we were backing up our NAS systems to tape mountains of tape. For us, this process was costly, inefficient, and required a significant amount of administrative oversight. With variable RTOs, it wasn’t simple or scalable enough to keep up with the speed of our business, particularly in a critical recovery situation,” said Brandt. “With Rubrik, we can now protect our NAS datasets directly in AWS. Being able to manage our NAS archives within Rubrik’s intuitive environment, provides better and more transparent protection for our growing NAS environments and allows us to reap the benefits of scalability and cost efficiencies in the cloud. Rubrik has been the answer to many of our backup and DR challenges, and the simplified and consolidated services ultimately allow us to better serve our users and consumers.”

With Rubrik, we can now protect our NAS datasets directly in AWS. Rubrik provides better and more transparent protection for our growing NAS environments and allows us to reap the benefits of scalability and cost efficiencies in the cloud.

Dustin Brandt
Director of IT

Featured: NAS Direct Archive

Increased productivity and more time for strategic initiatives

"As a small team, we just don’t have the time to worry about backups–they simply have to work, without fussing and agonizing over configurations, backup windows, bandwidth, and orchestration. Before Rubrik, our legacy system required multiple proxies, which needed constant updating and adjustments. This meant we were spending 5 to 6 hours per week just managing backup systems, never mind the backups themselves,” said Brandt. “With Rubrik, I can’t even tell you the last time I worried about any of that! It just works.”

Before Rubrik, our legacy system required multiple proxies, which needed constant updating and adjustments. This meant we were spending 5 to 6 hours per week just managing backup systems, never mind the backups themselves. With Rubrik, I can’t even tell you the last time I worried about any of that!

Dustin Brandt
Director of IT

Featured: Rubrik CDM

The Results

83% reduction in data center footprint:

“With Rubrik’s software convergence, our data center footprint decreased from 12U to 2U.”

Streamlined compliance for audits

“With annual financial audits, we have to ensure valid backups of our data and recoveries on the fly. Rubrik provides critical evidence of compliance for our backup requirements with our auditors."

Breakthrough simplicity from setup to management

"We had Rubrik up and running and protecting our workloads in the same day. With zero initial training, we were able to jump right into Rubrik’s clean and intuitive UI and start protecting all of our environments.”

Seamless hybrid multi-cloud archival

“A core reason for choosing Rubrik was its cloud vendor-agnostic platform, preventing lock-in to any particular cloud. We were able to migrate off tape and adopt a hybrid multi-cloud model. We’re currently leveraging AWS to archive our NAS and virtualization data, and we use GCP for testing and development.”

Fast recovery in the cloud

“With our legacy system, we couldn’t guarantee RTOs. With Rubrik’s Google-like predictive search, we can instantly find our data in the cloud, and restores that used to take up to a day are now 10 minutes or less.”

Rubrik CloudOn for disaster recovery to the cloud

“Disaster recovery is integral to the success of ATK. Thanks to Rubrik, we’ve strengthened our DR strategy with Rubrik’s CloudOn feature. With easy setup and control integrated into Rubrik’s interface, we can replicate our on-prem apps to the cloud, replicate cloud-to-cloud within our multicloud environment, and instantly spin up systems and apps in the cloud. This is a huge step forward for our business continuity and disaster planning–it has unlocked options and functionality in the cloud that we didn’t have prior to Rubrik.”

Policy-driven simplicity

“The ability to automatically apply the same SLA policies and customize fileset archiving across our NAS environment is a huge time saver. Since RTOs are no longer an issue, we can evaluate our assets by criticality to the business and level of change and adjust our policies accordingly.”

Cost efficiency

“With Rubrik, we were able to reduce NAS backup storage costs while also realizing the benefits of cloud, such as zero infrastructure maintenance for our long-term archives and commodity pricing in cloud storage costs.”