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February 2025

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What is our primary use case?

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What is our primary use case?

How has it helped my organization?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What is our primary use case?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

How was the initial setup?

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What is most valuable?

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How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Originally posted at https://vinfrastructure.it/2016/01/rubrik-reinvent-the-backup/

Some months Rubrik announced the release of version 2.0 of Rubrik Converged Data Management to deliver complete data protection and rich data services at a global scale (see also my previous post).

The idea is quite simple but disruptive: reinvent the backup models in order to eliminate backup software by integrating data protection, instant recovery, and DevOps infrastructure into a single scale-out product!

Data protection is usually something complex, or at least with several components:

Rubrik can remove all of them:

An simple move to converged, scale-out and appliance based architecture:

The idea is similar to Cohesity approach (for example) but Rubrik stats with the data protection in mind as a first scope of their solution, so several features (in this area) are better developed (yet). It’s interesting see also people from Symantec, Data Domain, Veritas in the investors list.

During the last IT Press Tour #17 I’ve got the opportunity to learn more about this solution, directly the board of Rubrik: Bipul Sinha (CEO), Arvind Jain, Arvind Nithrakashyap. For the technical presentation there was also Chris Wahl.

As written the solution is (physical) appliance based, using the model of Data Domain (that has change the tradition backup infrastructure), but using a “Web-Scale” model typical of hyper-converged product, with a grow as you go approach in 2U increments. And with a really easy setup and configuration: it can be up and running in 15 minutes!
One of the best quote is: “it looks simple because we make it simple”, Bipul Sinha. It’s really simple to use and with a fast interface.

The r300 Series is a Converged Data Management appliance that provides automated backup, instant recovery, unlimited replication, and data archival at infinite scale.

The Rubrik cluster should start from three appliances, each of them can have 12x4TB HDD or 12x8TB HDD, plus 4x400GB SSD, and can grow as you need. Deduplication is cluster-wide to improve space usage.

Actually it support VMware vSphere 5.1, 5.5 or 6.0 and you have only to point to a vCenter Server and use policy based rules (called SLA Domains) to protect your VMs. At this time only VMware platform is supported, but the entire architecture is platform agnostic, so could be possible see new virtualization platform supported in the future.
In order to provide application consistency, Rubrik push a VSS provider inside each VMs.

As show in the previous picture it’s possible replicate or simple increase the retention with an external object storage: S3 is supported, but for on-prem infrastructure (if needed) could be used S3 (for example with Scality) or Swift. Also NFS could be used for on-prem long term retention.

For site replication more Rubrik appliance could be used, both for DR purpose or Dev/Test cases.

And what about the data services, like the ability to have application-level recovery? Actually this is not included or integrated and it’s far from other products (like Veeam). Rubrik has a partnership with Kroll on Track to provide this services, but I think that simplicity and convergence mean also have those kind of services inside the solution itself and I hope to see something in the next releases.

Originally posted http://theithollow.com/2015/06/29/a-new-standard-for-backups-rubrik/

It’s pretty weird to get excited about backups, but I’ve found myself thinking how cool the new technology that Rubrik‘s designing. If you haven’t heard of these guys yet, you will. They presented at Virtualization Field Day 5 in Boston and had some new announcements that will blow your socks right off your feet.

All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtualization Field Day 5. This was the only compensation given and did not influence the content of this article.

The first of these announcements really had nothing to do with technology, but rather with people. Rubrik announced to the world that my good friend Chris Wahl was joining their team as Technical Evangelist. Thats a pretty big “get” for Rubrik, signing a top 10 Virtualization blogger and two times over VCDX to their team. I think it also lends some credence to their legitimacy, as I don’t suspect Mr. Wahl would have joined a team that didn’t already have something going for it.

Why is Rubrik Cool?

The Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha explained to us that the main objective of Rubrik was to make backups useful and easy to manage. His example was using Apple’s Time Machine technology. How come my laptop backup is so easy to manage, but a corporate server backup is so difficult. Obviously servers are backed up more often with more stringent SLA etc, but his point was well received. It should be easy to do because no one wants to spend their time managing backups.

Rubrik’s model uses a hardware appliance with a scale out architecture similar to Nutanix. (This shouldn’t be a coincidence since Bipul is a founding investor in Nutanix) Rubrik’s appliance is sold as a brick (chassis) with 4 nodes (servers) in it. Once the appliance is racked, cabled and IP’d the next step is to connect it to your vCenter server(s). The Rubrik software scans the vCenter for a list of virtual machines and from there, you can select VMs to backup to the Rubrik appliance. Rubrik’s team is touting this process that only takes 15 minutes to get up and running. 

Note: right now this is a 1.0 product and only supports VMware, but the roadmap is to support Hyper-V and Physical machines as well. It is not meant to be only for VMware environments for ever.

Backup Process

The process of backing up virtual machines to the Rubrik device consists of selecting a virtual machine and selecting a SLA. There are some default SLAs that come with the appliance but the backup admin is allowed to create as many as he/she needs in order to meet the organizations retention periods and backup windows.

Once the backups start, the virtual machine is snapshotted and the bits are shipped over to the Rubrik appliance where they are inline deduplicated and stored on flash temporarily. Depending on the SLA, these backups will be stored on disk as well as possibly shipped off to an S3 storage endpoint, most likely Amazon S3. This is neat right? How many times have you heard corporations state that they want to keep all data for seven years right up until they hear how much storage they are going to need to buy to accomplish that? Now Rubrik can keep the most recently backed up information locally on disk but ship off some of the bits to a cloud storage device.

Recovery Process

OK, the backup process is pretty slick. Pick a VM and a policy and let Rubrik do its thing. But everyone knows that the backup is only as good as the recovery process. Rubrik’s recovery model is great! From the Rubrik HTML5 web portal, pick the VM and a backup date to restore, or for a single file restore pick the vm, the file and the file date to restore. Simple process and the search process is VERY fast. This is because all of the backup metadata is stored on the Rubrik flash drives for quick recalls.

Now that we’ve found the files, we can perform either a recovery or an instant mount. The recovery process will power down the existing virtual machine and recover the backup in its place. Nothing new there, but if we need a recovery to take place faster, we can mount the backup directly on the Rubrik flash tier and mount it to vCenter over an NFS mount point.

Summary

I don’t know what these appliances are going to cost, but Bipul assured us all that they won’t disappoint. With an easy backup process, simple and fast recovery process, ability to scale out and still keep a single deduplication domain and a fast storage appliance, all I can think of to say is to “shut up and take my money.” We’ll see how this product does on the market , but I have a feeling that this is going to be the new gold standard for backup solutions.