Rubrik, the Palo Alto based company who strives to simplify data protection within the enterprise has recently announced a series C worth a cool 61 million, doubling their total capital to a cool 112 million since founding just over a couple of years ago! And as much as I love to hear about venture capital and money and whatnot I’m much more into the tech as I’m sure my readers are as well! With that, alongside that Series C announcement comes a new release of their product, dubbed Rubrik Firefly!
Rubrik Firefly – A Cloud Data Management Platform
With this third major release from Rubrik comes a bit of a rebrand if you will – a cloud data management platform. Nearly all organizations today have some sort of cloud play in their business; whether that be to build out a private cloud and support legacy applications or consume public cloud resources for cloud native applications – they all have some kind of initiative within their business that aligns with cloud. The problem Rubrik sees here is that the data management and data protection solutions running within those business simply don’t scale to match what the cloud offers. Simply put, customers need to be able to manage, secure, and protect their data no matter where it sits – onsite, offsite, cloud, no matter what stage of cloud they are at – thus spawning the Cloud Data Management Platform
So what’s new?
Aside from a number of improvements and enhancements Rubrik Firefly brings a few big new features to the table; Physical Workloads, Edge Environments, and spanning across clouds. Let’s take a look at each in turn…
Physical Workloads
I had a chance to see Rubrik a way back at Virtualization Field Day 5 where we got a sneak peek at their roadmap – at the time they supported vSphere only and had no immediate plans for physical workloads. The next time they showed up at Tech Field Day 10 they actually had a bit of a tech preview of their support for physical MSSQL support – and today that has become a reality. As you can see they are moving very fast with development of some of these features! Rubrik Firefly adds official support for those physical SQL servers that you have in your environment, you know, the ones that take up so much resources that the DBA’s just will not let you virtualize. Rubrik can now back these up in an automated, forever incremental fashion and give you same easy of use, efficiency, and policy based environment that you have within your virtual workload backups. Firefly does this by deploying a lightweight Windows service, the Rubrik Connector Service onto your SQL server, allowing you to perform point in time restores and log processing through the same UI you’ve come to know with Rubrik. Aside from deploying the service everything else is exactly the same – we still have SLA policy engine, SLA domains, etc.
And they don’t stop at just SQL! Rubrik Firefly offers the same type of support for those physical Linux workloads you have lying around. Linux is connected into Rubrik through an rpm package, allowing for ease of deployment – From there Rubrik pulls in a list of files and directories on the machine, and again, provides the same policy based approach as to what to back up, when to back it up, and where to store it!
Both the SQL msi installer and the Linux rpm packaged are fingerprinted to the Rubrik cluster that creates them – allowing you to ensure you are only processing backups from the boxes you allow.
Edge Support
Although Rubrik is shipped as a physical appliance we all know that this is a software based world – and that doesn’t change with Rubrik. The real value in Rubrik is the way the software works! Rubrik has taken their software and bundled it up into a virtual appliance aimed for Remote/Branch Offices. What this does is allow those enterprises with remote or branch offices to deploy a Rubrik instance at each location, all talking back to the mothership if you will at the main office. This allows for the same policy based approach to be applied to those workloads running at the remote locations, thus allowing things such as replication back to the main office, archive to cloud, etc to be performed on the edge of the business along with at the main office. The Virtual Appliance is bundled as an ova and sold on a “# of VMs” protected basis – so if you have only a handful of VMs to protect you aren’t paying through the nose to get that protection.
Cloud Spanning
Finally we come to cloud spanning. Rubrik has always supported AWS as a target for archiving backups and brought us an easy to use efficient way of getting just the pieces of data we need back from AWS – but, we all know that Microsoft has been pushing Azure quite heavily as of late handing out lots and lots of credits! You can now take those spare credits and put them to good use as Firefly brings in support for Azure blob storage! The same searching and indexing technology that Rubrik has for Amazon can now be applied to Azure as well, giving customers options as to where they archive their data!
Bonus Feature – Erasure Coding
How about one more? With the Firefly release Rubrik now utilizes erasure coding, bringing in a number of performance and capacity enhancements to their customers with a simple software upgrade! Without putting hard numbers to it customers can expect to see a big increase in their free capacity once they perform the non-disruptive switch over to erasure coding!
Firefly seems like a great step towards the cloud data management platform – a topology agnostic approach to wrapping policy around your data, no matter where it is, ensuring it’s protected and secured! The release of a Virtual Appliance perks my ears up as well – although it’s aimed directly at ROBO deployments now who knows where it might go in the future – perhaps we will see a software-only release of Rubrik someday?!? If you are interested in learning more Rubrik has a ton of resources on their site – I encourage you to check them out for yourself. Congratulations Rubrik on the Series C and the new release!
