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.