UC San Diego Achieves Instant SQL Recovery and Migrates to AWS S3 with Rubrik

Overview

Founded in 1960, University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) is a high-ranking public institution located in the La Jolla community of San Diego, California. With over $1 billion in annual research funding, UC San Diego is one of top 15 research universities worldwide. Their faculty, researchers, and alumni have received numerous awards, including 25 Nobel Prizes, three Field Medals, and two Pulitzer Prizes. The university has six undergraduate colleges, five academic divisions, and five graduate and professional schools.

At the university, the 400-person IT department supports over 30,000 students and 6,000 faculty and staff. John Iraci, Director of Computing Infrastructure, oversees a team of 50 to manage infrastructure operations and applications. “From ensuring secure access to student’s emails, providing computer software at our research labs, or enabling a staff member to complete a purchase order, IT lives at the center of the university,” said Iraci. “With Rubrik, we have peace of mind that our data is protected.”

Solutions

Empowering other business units with self-service data management

One of the key requirements for UC San Diego was multi-tenancy. “To accelerate the delivery of backup and recovery across the organization, we wanted to give greater access and privileges to other departments,” said Iraci. “Rubrik takes an innovative approach to multi-tenancy, providing an easier way to define organizations and assign policies and protected objects at a granular level. Now, we can provide each department self-service access to manage its own policies that align with business objectives.”

SQL live mount for fast recovery and forensic analysis

Rubrik’s innovation with SQL Live Mount was an integral use case for the university. “We absolutely love SQL Live Mount; it intelligently handles data management to enable fast recovery for our physical and virtual SQL databases. Even if we rename a database, Rubrik ensures that we keep the same backup chain, so I never lose my old one,” said Vassall.

UC San Diego currently uses SQL Live Mount for accelerated upgrade testing and security analysis for machines that may have been compromised. “Live Mount makes test/dev so much easier than our previous solution. Even more, Rubrik enables self-service recoveries for our DBAs,” said Vassall. “Our security team also uses SQL Live Mount for forensic analysis. Once we uncovered a potential intrusion, our DBAs performed a Live Mount to instantly spin up copies of several databases to analyze and resolve the situation without being online.”

Data archival to AWS S3 for long-term retention and future disaster recovery

With its previous legacy solution, UC San Diego was unable to migrate to the cloud. “If we tried archiving to the cloud, it would have taken weeks. Also, our legacy solution lacked a native integration so there was no clear path to getting started,” said Vassall. “With Rubrik, it only took 36 hours to migrate our entire infrastructure, around 2,000 virtual machines, into AWS S3.”

“Rubrik allowed us to integrate seamlessly with AWS S3 and securely mobilize our applications from on-prem to cloud,” added Iraci. “Cloud elasticity lets us scale our capacity as we grow, whether that’s adjusting retention policies or adding new systems. We also plan on closing our data centers on campus over the next few years so we’ll need to migrate a significant number of applications to the cloud.”

UC San Diego is also evaluating cloud to enable a stronger disaster recovery plan. “Having our data in multiple locations provides greater insurance in the event of data loss or a failure. Since Rubrik is a top tier partner with public cloud vendors, such as Amazon, it provides seamless integration between our data management solution and cloud storage,” said Vassall. “With Rubrik’s CloudOn, we can quickly spin up cloud instances in AWS S3 and power down immediately after the conversion. This will allow us to easily move workloads between on-prem and cloud to enable a stronger disaster recovery to the cloud.”