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In this episode we talk with Chris Wahl, Chief Technologist, Rubrik. This is our second time having Chris on our show. The last time was about three years ago (see our Chris on agentless backup podcast). Talking with Chris again was great and there’s been plenty of news since we last spoke with him.
Rubrik now has three products the Rubrik Cloud Data Protection suite (onprem, virtual or in the [AWS & Azure] cloud), the Rubrik Datos IO (recent acquisition) for NoSql database with semantic dedupe and Rubrik Polaris GPS, a SaaS monitoring/trending/management solution for your data protection environment. Polaris GPS monitors and watches data protection trends for you, to insure all your data protection SLAs are being met. But we didn’t spend much time on Polaris.
Datos IO was designed from the start to backup new databases based on NoSQL technologies and provides, a semantic based deduplication capability, that’s unique in the industry . We talked with Datos IO before their acquisition by Rubrik (see our podcast with Tarun on 3rd generation data protection).
Cloud Data Protection
As for their Cloud Data Protection suite, one major differentiator is that all their functionality is available via RESTful APIs. Their GUI is completely built off their APIs. This means any customer could use their set of APIs to integrate Rubrik data protection with any application/workload on the planet.
Chris mentioned that Rubrik has 40+ specific application/system integrations that provide “strictly consistent” data protection. We assume this means application consistent backups and recovery but goes beyond mere applications.
With the Cloud Data Protection solution, data resides on the appliance for only a short (customer specifiable) period and then is migrated off to cloud or onprem object storage. The object storage could be any onprem S3 compatible storage, in the AWS or Azure cloud. It’s completely automatic. The data migrated to object storage is self-defining, meaning that metadata and data are all available in one spot and can be restored anywhere there’s a Rubrik Cloud Data Protection suite operating.
The Cloud Data Protection appliance also supports onboard search and analytics to search backup/recovery metadata/catalogs. As such, there’s no need to purchase other tools to uncover which backup files exist. Their solution also uses data deduplication to reduce the data stored.
Data stored is also encrypted by customer keys and use HTTPS to transfer data. So, data is secured at rest, secured in flight and deduped. Cloud Data Protection also offers data mobility. That is it can move your VMs and data from onprem to the cloud and use Rubrik in the cloud to rehydrade the data and translate your VMs to run in AWS or Azure and it works in reverse, translating AWS/Azure compute instances into VMs.
Rubrik’s major differentiator is simplicity. Traditionally, customers had been conditioned to thinking data protection took hours to maintain, fix and keep running. But with Rubrik Cloud Data Protection, a customer just points it to an application and selects an SLA, and Rubrik takes over from there.
The secret behind Rubrik’s simplicity is Cerebro. Cerebro is where they have put all the smarts to understand a data center’s infrastructure, applications/VMs, protected data and requested SLAs and just makes it work
The podcast runs ~27 minutes. Chris was great to talk with again and given how long it’s been since we last talked, he had much to discuss. Rubrik seems like an easy solution to adopt and if their growth is any indicator, customers agree. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
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Chris Wahl, Chief Technologist, Rubrik
Chris Wahl, author of the award winning Wahl Network blog and host of the Datanauts Podcast, focuses on creating content that revolves around virtualization, automation, infrastructure, and evangelizing products and services that benefit the technology community.
In addition to co-authoring “Networking for VMware Administrators” for VMware Press, he has published hundreds of articles and was voted the “Favorite Independent Blogger” by vSphere-Land three years in a row (2013 – 2015). Chris also travels globally to speak at industry events, provide subject matter expertise, and offer perspectives to startups and investors as a technical adviser.