Headquartered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lamar Advertising is one of the largest outdoor advertising companies in the world and has over 348,000 displays across the United States and Canada. In addition to its more traditional out of home inventory, Lamar is proud to offer its customers the largest network of digital billboards in the United States.
Peter Dunn, Director of Infrastructure, is focused on fostering innovation across the organization while working to provide reliable, accessible infrastructure for 4,000 employees. “With something as critical as IT, any roadblocks can bottleneck larger projects, which is why it’s essential to adopt cost-effective tools that optimize for efficiency,” said Dunn. Rubrik protects everything that makes our business run, from pipeline management tools to the systems that power our digital billboards themselves. We need to have the utmost confidence in the infrastructure we build.”
“As innovation continues to permeate the IT space, it’s increasingly important to be intentional about the tools we leverage,” said Dunn. “As a manager, I know that bringing in tools that encourage economical use of my team’s time is critical to maintaining low turnover and supporting job satisfaction. Adopting transformative technologies like Rubrik allows my employees to spend more time on interesting, value-added work that propels the whole business forward.”
UNRELIABLE LEGACY SOLUTION HINDERS OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY
As Dunn and his team were coming up on a painful replacement for their previous legacy solution, they knew they needed more agile technology to help support their hyper-growth environment.
“We immediately saw that Rubrik could introduce a level of dexterity into our environment that we couldn’t have imagined before,” said Dunn. “Previously, our solution required the full attention of one of our employees, someone we never intended to focus entirely on backup. With Rubrik, daily management is essentially hands-off, so they have now been able to reallocate their time for more strategic work. Not only was Rubrik a solution that my engineers could pick up quickly, but it allowed us to create an IT environment focused on innovation rather than maintenance. In terms of ingenuity and operational efficiency, it was clear that Rubrik was in line with how we think next-gen technologies should run.”
“Rubrik is a solution that’s built to operationalize for efficiency. When paired with exciting technical innovation like the Live Mount capabilities and granular file search, it was easy to see the impact it would have on the productivity of our entire company,” added Dunn.
GAINING A COMPETITIVE EDGE WITH NEXT-GEN DATA MANAGEMENT
As market leaders in the digital billboard space, Lamar leverages their IT organization to both maintain their standing and capitalize on new opportunities to differentiate. “We’re displaying unique images every 6-8 seconds across thousands of billboards across the nation, and it takes a lot of technical horsepower on the backend to ensure that things are running the way they should be,” said Dunn. “Our infrastructure needs to be flexible in order to support the growth necessary to undertake these projects that help give us a competitive edge.”
Prior to Rubrik, inelastic IT capabilities limited where Lamar could expand. “Once we reached 700 digital billboard locations, we really hit a brick wall,” said Dunn. “The business is always chomping at the bit to keep growing, but we simply didn’t have the elastic infrastructure in place to accommodate the customers and advertisers we were reaching. Technologies like Rubrik allow us to scale infinitely; I think of it as future-proofing. With Rubrik, we’re able to quickly adapt to the needs of the business and approach opportunities confident that we have the capacity to expand our operations.”
Lamar uses Rubrik to protect their 100% virtualized environment, including SQL databases and mission-critical applications. Benefits include:
• 90% management time savings (1 FTE back to the business): “What Rubrik has done for my team’s productivity cannot be understated. Not only has Rubrik’s simplicity and reliability allowed one of my employees to completely step away from full-time backup management, but it has given my entire team time to focus on proactive security measures. A strong, multi-faceted security strategy takes time to build, and my team can’t do that if they’re still trying to fix what broke last week. The most valuable use of my team’s time is brainstorming in meetings or investigating our areas for opportunity as an organization. Rubrik has enabled us to now make sizable strides forward in our security posture.”
• Near-zero RTO: “Rubrik’s Live Mount recovery has been a game-changer for our environment. After a botched upgrade for a server that supported our licensing operations, we put it to the test. We would have been happy if it was restored within the 30-minute estimate we gave to our team–it was back up in seconds.”
• Significantly improved backup performance: “With our previous solutions, we were experiencing a number of backup failures; even our successful backups had poor recovery times. With Rubrik, we’re seeing significantly faster, more consistent backups. We’re not missing a day because garbage collects didn’t run overnight and now we have to hop on the phone with support. It checks all the boxes for effortless backup policy orchestration.”
• Strengthened DR strategy: “Our primary operations are based in South Louisiana, so we have to contend with hurricanes in addition to standard data security concerns. Previous recoveries were complex and, depending on the system, could take hours, requiring anything from writing scripts to restore from SAN replication to entirely rebuilding an OS. With Rubrik, we can stand up VMs instantly and be back online in seconds. It’s given us a lot more comfort in our ability to recover faster should something happen–not just a few minutes faster, but significantly faster to where there is a clear impact for our business units.”
• Seamless integration with Pure Storage: “We’re a big Pure Storage shop, so learning about their tight partnership with Rubrik was a key factor in our decision. The pair deliver far superior performance, and I can’t imagine going back to our setup before our current hybrid array.”
• World-class support: “Once you experience truly excellent support, you can’t lower your standards. Rubrik’s team has been exceptionally communicative, and we can rely on them for quick, painless troubleshooting.”
