Melbourne-based manufacturer Fenner Dunlop Australia gained 91 days of added productivity by moving to Rubrik’s Cloud Data Management platform, a move that has also led to significant cost savings.

Headquartered in Melbourne, Fenner Dunlop manufactures and supplies a complete conveyor system from head-to-tail: belt, electrics and terminal equipment. With more than 30 sites in Australia, the company delivers engineered conveyor solutions to evolve the way mining companies approach their conveyor belt life cycles, saving costs, and increasing productivity.

“As a company, everything we do is supported by information systems,” said Sammy Jammal, National IT Manager at Fenner Dunlop Australia. “Manufacturing, technical support, installation, maintenance, diagnostics services, you name it.

“If the system is down for even 10 minutes, the whole operation would come to a halt. This not only has financial implications but is detrimental to our brand reputation and diminishes our customers’ confidence. As an IT team, we want to leverage technology that can help optimise our processes, allowing us to focus on enabling our users and thereby benefiting our customers.”

Jammal oversees an IT team of six, which supports more than 900 employees nationwide, including the core applications – spanning finance, payroll, time and attendance, paperless office and workflow automation systems – which employees need to perform their roles.

Prior to Rubrik, Fenner Dunlop struggled with its tape-based legacy backup and disaster recovery solution’s slow performance and time-consuming upgrades.

“Our previous solution was extremely unreliable,” said Jammal. “We didn’t know if backups would take four hours, 20 hours, or if they would work at all. Because of this, we were spending 15 hours per week just managing the system. It was important to us to find a solution that would reduce the man hours maintaining backups and allow us to move off tape.”

Since deploying Rubrik, Fenner Dunlop has eliminated the manual management of backups completely. The team now spends less than five minutes per day checking email alerts. Previously, the company was forced to devote an entire weekend to complete full backups to tape, a task that now requires a few minutes.

With 20 to 60 users in each of its Australian locations, the majority of Fenner Dunlop’s workforce works remotely. Many of those who work at customer sites never even visit an office, rendering mobility and accessibility a critical factor to its operations

“We want to empower our users to self-serve wherever they are, without limitations of having to be connected to the main server,” said Jammal. “That’s why moving to the cloud is a priority, so our users can do their job from anywhere, anytime, on any device.

“Rubrik was our steppingstone into the cloud; it allowed us to leverage Microsoft Azure for long-term retention. We are now much more confident knowing that it only takes a few clicks to restore and support our users without geographic restrictions.”

Jammal cites a variety of benefits that Fenner Dunlop has accrued from the new system:

  • 90% management time savings: “With our previous system, we devoted 15 hours per week to just managing backups,” he says. “Now we literally only spend five minutes a day checking email alerts. As a result of adopting Rubrik, we have recovered more than 91 days of additional productivity.”
  • 90% faster backup performance: “Incremental-forever backups deliver much faster backups. Previously, we were doing full weekly backups to tape, which would take the entire weekend. Now, backups are completed in minutes.”
  • Significant cost savings: “By switching to Rubrik, we have reduced costs by eliminating tape, support licenses, and archiving to public cloud.”
  • Near-zero recovery time objectives (RTOs): “With Rubrik, recovering files is instantaneous, thanks to its Google-like real-time search capability that makes locating files easy and accurate.”
  • Easy cloud archival to Microsoft Azure: “Moving to the cloud was not possible with our previous solution. Rubrik’s native integration with Azure allows us to maximise our storage efficiency as we scale our cloud footprint. We were also able to migrate off tape, eliminating unnecessary overhead and leading to immediate hard savings.”
  • CloudOn for disaster recovery: “Disaster recovery is top of mind for us. With Rubrik’s CloudOn, we can quickly spin up cloud instances in Azure, allowing us to easily move workloads between on-prem and cloud to enable a stronger disaster recovery to the cloud. The peace of mind we now have with Rubrik is invaluable.”

www.rubrik.com

www.fennerdunlop.com.au