Rubrik Enables Baldwin Park Unified School District to Pivot Quickly Amidst Pandemic and Adopt Microsoft Azure

30% TCO

Savings of $20,000+ per year

65 days

Of additional productivity back to the business

10U to 2U

Data center footprint reduction

Overview

Located in the central San Gabriel Valley of Southern California, Baldwin Park is home to over 75,000 residents. It offers easy access to all of Los Angeles’s attractions and holds the distinction of being home to the very first In-N-Out Burger, built in 1948.

The Baldwin Park Unified School District (BPUSD) serves the city’s 13,600 public school students. Manny Sanchez, BPUSD’s IT Infrastructure Systems Manager, runs the district’s centralized data center and handles backup and recovery for 18,000 users across 28 sites. He and his team operate on very clear goals: “IT cannot be a bottleneck between learning and the end-user. Our job is to ensure a good user experience for our students,” said Sanchez.

I believe Rubrik would be beneficial to any district, especially if you have data in your data center that you need to make sure is safe and secure.

Manny Sanchez
IT Infrastructure Systems Manager

Featured Product: Rubrik Cloud Data Management

Challenges

Management complexity from daily maintenance
Lengthy, unreliable recovery process
Increasing licensing and hardware costs
Inability to scale and move to the cloud

Results

30% TCO savings of $20,000+ per year
65 days of additional productivity back to the business
Near-zero RTOs
Data center footprint reduction from 10U to 2U

Business Transformation

Moved from expensive and cumbersome backup solutions to a single data management plane that provides quick and easy access to sensitive data
Saved both time and money, reducing data center infrastructure spend by 30% and cutting restore time from days to minutes
Enhanced security for the district amidst increasing cyber threats and is supporting its cloud transition strategy and VDI initiative

Challenges

Hampered by expensive and time-consuming legacy solutions

Prior to implementing Rubrik, BPUSD relied on a tape library for backup, which meant that any recovery took days to weeks to complete. They transitioned to using two appliances, one for backing up virtual instances and the other for file shares, but that required paying two licensing fees. It was doubly cumbersome having to recover data from two different places using two different methods.

What BPUSD needed was a data backup solution that was both easy to manage and secure.

“We back up a lot of sensitive data – everything from school psychologist records that are protected by HIPAA to social security numbers to 20+ years of confidential student records,” explained Sanchez. “We are also subject to public records requests from the community and are required to hold records for departments across the organization for varying lengths of time. For example, finance information must be saved for 10 years, and data collected by food services needs to be retained for seven. With that said, protecting our data is absolutely critical.”

BPUSD ultimately chose Rubrik because of the ease of use and the simple licensing structure. Moreover, the ability to easily adopt the public cloud and Rubrik’s integration with Microsoft Azure were deciding factors.

“I’m very happy with Rubrik and I’m confident that we made the right choice,” said Sanchez. “I believe Rubrik would be beneficial to any district, especially if you have data in your data center that you need to make sure is safe and secure.”

Two hours of my day used to be dedicated just to making sure backups were happening and the right tapes were in the library.

Manny Sanchez
IT Infrastructure Systems Manager

Solutions

Moving to the cloud

BPUSD had begun its cloud journey in an effort to allow users to access all of the learning resources they need from any device and to do so remotely.

BPUSD was steadily moving to a 1:1 device ratio for teachers and students, but when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, the district had to drastically accelerate its cloud journey to support online learning. What started as a two-year implementation quickly became a two-month sprint, with devices being distributed as quickly as possible to students and teachers. WiFi hotspots were also critical for users who didn’t have internet connectivity. Through partnership with Sprint and the support of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, Sanchez and his team were able to distribute 1,000 hotspots to users based on need.

Rubrik’s seamless integration with Microsoft is helping advance the district’s emerging Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) initiative and enabled BPUSD to archive to Azure. In the near future, Sanchez and team are planning to implement Office 365 backups with Rubrik

We were paying roughly $20,000 for our licensing in the past and we had to pay for tapes and hardware maintenance. With Rubrik, that’s completely gone.

Manny Sanchez
IT Infrastructure Systems Manager

Featured: Rubrik CDM

The Results

65 days of additional productivity back to the business

“Two hours of my day used to be dedicated just to making sure backups were happening and the right tapes were in the library. With Rubrik, I get a quarter of my day back.”

30% TCO savings

“We’ve saved 30% over three years on data center infrastructure spend by moving to Rubrik and Azure from Unitrends and Data Domain.”

Repurposing IT dollars

“We were paying roughly $20,000 for our licensing in the past and we had to pay for tapes and hardware maintenance. With Rubrik, that’s completely gone. We’ve been able to put that money toward other initiatives.”

Protection from cyber threats

“Ransomware is a big looming threat. In fact, neighboring school districts have been hit hard by it. That was one of the reasons we chose Rubrik, to ensure our data would be encrypted in the event of an attack.”