#VFD5 Preview – Rubrik

There has been much a buzz about Rubrik over the last few weeks with them going GA and coming up with oh, you know, a cool 41 mil in series B funding.  Certainly if you haven’t heard of them before you can probably recognize their name now!  I for one, had not looked at their solutions at all.  I’ve heard the name, but never gave it a look!  That will change come June 25th at Virtualization Field Day 5 when Rubrik takes the stage to deep dive into what they dub “The worlds first converged data management platform”.

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Disclaimer: As a Virtualization Field Day 5 delegate all of my flight, travel, accommodations, eats, and drinks are paid for. However I do not receive any compensation nor am I required to write anything in regards to the event or the sponsors. This is done at my own discretion.
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So what exactly is a data management platform?

It’s most certainly a fancy name but for sure it’s much much more.  In simple terms you can think of the Rubrik appliance (Brik) as a backup appliance – a backup appliance that is architected in such a way that you can scale to thousands of nodes depending on the amount of data you are looking to protect.  Currently they offer their r330, which is 3 node appliance with 10TB of disk and a r340, a 4 node appliance with 15 TB of disk.

Wait – did you say backup?

Sure, there are a lot of players in the backup space.  We have our traditional players that have seen it all.  Companies like Symantec and EMC come to mind.  Then virtualization came along and we started to see backup solutions being purpose built for virtualization.  Veeam, Unitrends, Trilead are near the top of the list.  So with all of these companies still at play within the data center backup space do we have room for one more?  Can Rubrik differentiate themselves from the others?

So what makes Rubrik unique?

Appliance driven – With the exception of Unitrends I don’t see many backup vendors coming in the form of a full appliance.  Essentially what Rubrik has done is take the software and hardware requirements of their backup solutions and deliver it in a 2U scaleable appliance architecture.  Speaking of scale Rubrik building block architecture allows all tasks and operations to be ran on top of any node within their cluster – therefore, the more nodes you add don’t just expand capacity, but should also increase performance and availability as well.

Global File Search – This one is a big feature in my opinion.  There has been countless times where someone I support has came up to me looking for a file to be restored, but can’t remember where they saved that file.  “I just clicked it from my recent documents” they normally say.  Rubrik has a file search capability that spans across all of your VMs and actually incorporates auto complete functionality – a little like Google for your backups.

Multi-Tiered Storage – Man!  Some companies are just getting around to incorporating some kind of auto tiering in their production storage – Rubrik are doing it in your backup storage.  What this does is increase efficiency and speed.  All data sent to the Rubrik appliance enters through a flash tier – and we all know the benefits of flash.  The flash tier also provides the basis for the global file search magic as it stores all meta data on SSD as well.

Cloud Integrated – Well Amazon S3 anyways.  Users are able to chose where backups are located, whether that be on premises or inside Amazon!  A great solution for any of those backups that you are required to save for long-term and are seldom accessed!

I mentioned earlier that I don’t know a lot about Rubrik – In fact all that I know is what I’ve written in this blog post!  The buzz surrounding Rubrik has been nothing short of amazing so I’m excited to see what they have to offer and what separates them out from the already established players in the market!  On June 25th @ 10:30 we will see what Rubrik has to offer.  You too can watch the live stream on the VFD5 event page or on my VFD5 event page where all of my content and blogs about the show will be posted.