Seattle Genetics Protects Critical Patient Data and Migrates to Azure with Rubrik

90%

Faster restores

90%

Management time savings

50%

Reduced data center footprint

Overview

Headquartered in Bothell, Washington, Seattle Genetics is the largest multi-product, global biotechnology company in the Pacific Northwest. The company is dedicated to improving patient outcomes with advanced antibody-drug conjugate technology delivering cancer-killing therapy to tumor cells. Their flagship drug, ADCETRIS® (brentuximab vedotin) is approved for the treatment of multiple lymphomas.

Paul Farmer, System Administrator, and Bryan Davis, Senior System Administrator, are part of a five-person infrastructure team supporting over 1,800 employees. The majority of their users are scientists who are constantly generating enormous amounts of highly sensitive data, including large image files. “Our environment comprises many older applications, which means that if you’re comparing batches of data, it can take up to 10 days to compute. The amount of data is so immense that our applications team is devoted to rolling out new technologies that reduce the amount of time it takes for data mining and imaging,” said Farmer.

“As part of the infrastructure team, we’re focused on protecting our users’ data and recovering it as quickly as possible,” added Farmer. “We make life easier for our scientists, so they can focus on curing patients. People are able to lead healthy, normal lives after taking our drugs, and we’re honored to play a part in that.”

“We’re a lean team, which means that our time is precious,” said Davis. “With Rubrik, we spend 90% less time on backups and have peace of mind that our data is protected.”

With Rubrik, we spend 90% less time on backups and have peace of mind that our data is protected.

Bryan Davis
Senior System Administrator

Featured Product: Rubrik Cloud Data Management

Challenges

Complicated and labor-intensive legacy solution
Lengthy restores of critical data
Inability to migrate to the cloud

Results

90% faster restores with Rubrik
90% management time savings
50% reduced data center footprint

The Solution

Easy-to-use software for automated backup, recovery, and public cloud archival
Instant recovery
Seamless integration with Microsoft Azure for cloud mobility

Challenges

Lack of confidence in a complex, labor-intensive legacy solution

Prior to Rubrik, Seattle Genetics was not confident in their legacy tape-based data management solution. “Microsoft Exchange is absolutely vital to our company. Our users expect zero downtime during the workday, so we need to perform our backups in an unobtrusive manner,” said Farmer. “With our previous solution, full backups often took days to complete, meaning that we were vulnerable during that time if a system went down.”

Seattle Genetics’ previous solution was also extremely complicated. “I would dread when Paul would go on vacation, and I had to fill in for him. Our previous solution required so much specialized knowledge, and I did not enjoy getting those tickets,” said Davis.

As their legacy system grew, it required more servers to protect the company’s data. “We tried creating more policies, but we couldn’t run them concurrently or adequately protect our systems on our backup windows,” said Farmer. “Now, we can easily meet our SLAs with Rubrik’s automated policy engine, which means I can sleep at night.”

Seattle Genetics began looking for a data management solution that would easily scale and was easy enough for anyone on their team to use. “We evaluated another data management vendor but had issues with larger VMs getting ingested from their solution into the cloud. On top of that, we were unhappy with their level of support. They wouldn’t even send anyone onsite to walk us through the proof of concept (POC). We were worried this was how they would treat us in the future,” said Farmer. “On the other hand, we couldn’t get the Rubrik team out of the building! We could tell they were in it for the long haul and would provide that level of attention we needed.”

Rubrik’s Google-like search combined with having the data at our fingertips has reduced our restore times by more than 90%.

Paul Farmer
System Administrator

Solutions

Cloud mobility with Rubrik and Azure

Seattle Genetics was interested in moving to the cloud but was hindered by their legacy solution. “Rubrik allowed us to migrate to the public cloud with confidence since all of our data is encrypted in-flight and at-rest. We are now archiving to Azure and have completely moved off tape,” said Davis.

“Our data requirements are 7 days onsite before getting archived to the cloud. We currently have more than 500 TB of data in Azure. Our savings in media costs and restore times are substantial, and we have unlimited room to grow without adding more backup servers,” said Farmer.

We can easily meet our SLAs with Rubrik’s automated policy engine, which means I can sleep at night.

Paul Farmer
System Administrator

Featured: Rubrik CDM

The Results

Full visibility with Rubrik Polaris GPS and live mount for test/dev

Seattle Genetics uses Rubrik to protect their 99% virtualized environment, including VMware and mission-critical applications like Microsoft Exchange. Other benefits include:

90% faster restores

“Rubrik’s Google-like search is a game changer. Our scientists often just provide us with partial file names, which means it previously could take us half a day to find their file. With Rubrik, we can type in part of the name and find the file in seconds. It’s also 90% faster for us to restore large amounts of data. The amount of time savings is absolutely critical for our small team.”

90% management time savings

“We were previously spending 40% of our week (around 13 hours) managing our backups. It only takes us two hours a week with Rubrik. Previously, upgrades could take up to 12 hours with our legacy solution. With Rubrik, it’s less than 15 minutes. On top of that, the solution is so simple to use that anyone on the team can perform restores.”

Full visibility with Rubrik Polaris GPS

“Rubrik’s Polaris GPS allows us to see all of our data through a single pane of glass. We already have two sites and are about to add a third for DR purposes. With Rubrik Polaris GPS, we now have a high-level view of all of our sites that can easily be shared with management.”

50% reduced data center footprint

“We reduced our data center footprint from a full rack to half a rack with Rubrik.”

Plug-and-play

“Our installation took less than an hour to get up and running and our environment protected."

Best-in-class customer support

“Rubrik’s team was very attentive during the POC and had no problem being onsite to demonstrate their product. After the purchase, we continue to receive rapid responses. Their support team is committed to transparency, and we love that they handle most of the legwork for us.”

Live Mount for test/dev

“Our DBAs love the Live Mount feature, especially when it comes to upgrades. Live Mount allowed us to upgrade our Oracle systems during business hours. System clones that took hours now only take a few minutes. As a result, our DBAs have now begun utilizing SQL Live Mount, which we are thrilled about.”

Accelerated regulatory compliance

“While we don’t keep customer data at the present time, we have concerns with the GDPR instituted by the European Union. Rubrik will make it easy to remain compliant and delete selected data when it is required.”