90%
90%
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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.
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%.
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.
The Results
Full visibility with 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: