A quick introduction to Rubrik

rubrikI first encountered Rubrik at this year’s Partner Exchange (PEX) 2015 in San Francisco. They had some promotional flyers made up labeled “Backup Still Sucks”. I guess a lot of people can relate to that. I had a chat with Julia Lee, who used to be a storage product marketing manager here at VMware, but recently moved to Rubrik. Rubrik’s pitch is that customers are currently stitching together backup software with backup storage in order to backup their virtual infrastructures – there is no seamless integration. Rubrik’s primary aim is backup simplicity – they want to provide a “time machine” like approach for virtual machine workloads.

Although I’m not allowed to say too much more about the company, we were given a product demonstration by Bipul Sinha (Rubrik CEO) last month.  Rubrik is offering a converged and scale-out backup software and backup storage appliance. This is a unique approach to me, since previously I only encountered companies that sold the backup software or sold the backup storage hardware. I hadn’t come across a company that converged both software and hardware for backup in a scale out solution like this.

The Rubrik appliance is a “rack and go” architecture, with the ability to scale from three to thousands of nodes (unlimited) using industry standard 2U commodity appliance hardware. There is a 3 node minimum configuration but deployment can grow one node at a time, in small, 2U increments. The Rubrik software includes both dedupe and compression technologies. With a 4 node configuration, Rubrik have the ability to protect 250-300 virtual machines, assuming that the size of the VMs is somewhere between 75GB – 100GB. One cool feature is the ability to live mount a backup of a VM from a previous point in time instantly.

Initially their focus is on vSphere, but I expect this to include other hypervisors over time.

An early access program opens to the general public on March 24th. Hopefully I will be able to do a deeper dive on their technology when they are no longer in stealth mode. You can learn more about Rubrik at rubrik.com. You can also follow them on twitter via @rubrikinc.

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