Rubrik has announced a major software release thats speeds backup and restore and extends public cloud coverage.
The data protection vendor’s Cloud Data Management (CDM) Andes 5.3 release also adds faster file scans and validates Oracle database restores.
Rubrik president Dan Rogers provided a statement: “With Andes 5.3 … companies can add automation to their data operations, protection across hybrid environments including all three major public cloud providers, and mitigate increasing data risks.”
That sounds bland but let’s consider the problem area for a moment. Rubrik has to provide enterprise backup and restore facilities, enable adherence to compliance regulations, and protect on-premises and three major public cloud environments from malware.
The number of things to be backed and restored – databases, applications and files – gets larger month by month and their size can grow too. A Rubrik customer could have 100 databases, 1,000 databases, 5,000 databases, even 10,000 or more, according to CEO Bipul Sinha. That means Rubrik’s system has to scale to cope, and run faster to keep pace with the growth.
Sinha said: “Every aspect of Rubrik recovery has to be superfast.”
Andes 5.3’s multiple speed improvements include:
- 10x faster backups of SQL Server environments with hundreds of databases per host–supporting up to 10,000 SQL databases on a single Rubrik 4-node cluster
- Oracle backup speed doubled to nearly one gigabyte per second
- ‘Recovery Validation’ feature for Oracle will enable validation and recovery tests that ensure an Oracle database is recoverable to a valid state
- NAS restore performance has improved 3x and NetApp scanning performance has doubled, allowing for 35 million files to be scanned in less than 15 minutes.
Sinha told us in a briefing that Covid-19 has accelerated enterprise’s movement to hybrid clouds and remote working. This hybrid cloud movement is the context for the second group of new features.
- CDM supports Google Cloud to include VMs and file sets, and automated discovery and backup of SAP HANA using SLA-based policies
- Protection of VMware Cloud on AWS adding to VMware protection across on-premises, AWS, Azure and Google
- Cloud-native Polaris management for Amazon RDS, enabling unified protection of RDS across multiple AWS accounts and regions, and recovery to different AWS regions
- New protection of Oracle databases on AWS and Azure
- Improved Smart Tiering to archive data to cool storage when storage savings are greater than the compute costs of having to reconstruct the data for recovery.
Rubrik told us Smart Tiering “works in Azure and we are working on a similar capability for AWS. For AWS, we offer instant tiering which allows customers to move data directly to Glacier or Deep Glacier storage at a fraction of the cost of S3.” The company will roll outSmart Tiering to AWS and GCP in the near future.
Rubrik’s next release of the Polaris Sonar compliance product will offer visibility into high risk locations, including sensitive files open to everyone and those that contain data that has not been accessed for some time.
Customer count
In our briefing, Sinha disclosed that Rubrik has passed the 2,700 customer count and is adding new enterprise customers at a rate of 200-300 per quarter.
He said Rubrik has a unified backup and storage offering that provides for immutable backups and protection against ransomware and contrasted this with Cohesity, Commvault, Veeam and others. He characterised these competitors as providing separate backup and storage products, with the storage product acting as a second attack surface for malware.
We noted the recent Veeam-Kasten and Pure-Portworx acquisitions and asked Sinha if Rubrik had considered buying or developing cloud-native backup of containerised apps. Rubrik wants to enter this space, he replied, and reminded us that the company had bought Datos IO for distributed database backup.
