Rubrik Cloud Data Management 4.1 Released – “More Than You Might Expect”

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Rubrik recently announced Version 4.1 of its Cloud Data Management product, and I thought it would be worthwhile running through some of the highlights.

 

Ecosystem

Azure CloudOn

This feature enables customers to power-on an archived snapshot of a VM in the cloud

  • Instance type recommendation based on VM config file (.vmx)
  • 2-click deployment with orchestration
  • UI Integration to launch, power off or de-provision an instance
  • On-demand or constant conversion

What are the use cases?

  • Spin up a cloud sandbox for dev/test use
  • Disaster Recovery
  • On-premises to cloud migration

 

[image courtesy of Rubrik]

 

There are some limitations to note:

  • The OS must be supported by Azure
  • A 1TB Max Disk Size

 

Other Enhancements

There are a few other enhancements, including:

  • AWS Glacier and Google CloudOut
  • Hyper-V SCVMM

I won’t cover them here but the Glacier and GCP Archive features seem pretty cool.

 

Core Features

SQL AAG

Alta introduced a lot of Oracle support, and this version introduces support for SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AAGs). Rubrik auto-detects settings / configurations within SQL Server

  • Availability Groups (“AGs”) – collections of SQL server replicas
  • AlwaysOn settings – includes replica failover order

Rubrik dynamically backs up the appropriate AG node based on the AG’s backup preferences. The AGs and selected AlwaysOn settings are displayed in the Rubrik UI.

There’s support for AlwaysOn manual and automatic failover transitions:

  • Target secondary replica specified by AlwaysOn settings
  • Previously had to manually swap DBs within Rubrik
  • Automatic failover for synchronous commit replicas only
  • Rubrik continues to backup DBs during AlwaysOn failover

There are some limitations to note:

  • Cannot restore / create DB within an Availability Group via Rubrik. This must be done within the SQL Server product;
  • SQL Server only supports automatic failover for synchronous replicas; and
  • The feature is not supported in versions of SQL Server from before 2012 (no Availability Groups then).

These limitations are common to AlwaysOn as a technology and are not Rubrik specific.

 

Multi-tenancy

Logically divide Rubrik Clusters into multiple management units (organizations). There are three roles that can be leveraged: Global Admin, Org Admin and End User.

Global Admin

  • Comprehensive privileges across all resources
  • Define Organization: subset of all resources
  • Assign Org Admin and define privileges

Org Admin

  • Privilege subset scoped to Organization resources
  • Assign End User and define privileges

End User

  • May be scoped to Organization
  • Can browse snapshots, recover files, and live mount on select resources

Organizations can be used to fully partition ALL objects associated with your Rubrik cluster by customer (MSP) or department (enterprise)

  • Protected objects
  • Archival targets
  • Replication targets
  • SLA domains
  • Service credentials
  • Users

Groups of logical objects (SLA Domains, Archival Targets, Protected Objects, Users) can be independently managed as an organization. There’s also integration with an existing directory service (AD).

 

VLAN Tagging

All the kids are into VLAN tagging nowadays, and Rubrik’s implementation provides the ability to segment traffic within physical networks via IEEE 802.1q. This is configurable at bootstrap or later via the CLI, and supports up to 25 VLANs per cluster. If you choose not to create any VLAN configuration during initial cluster setup all traffic will be untagged. Additionally, traffic that does not belong to a directly attached VLAN will be placed on the management interface/VLAN and routed through the default gateway.

 

General Enhancements

New Envision Report Customisations 

  • Two new Default reports (Capacity Over Time and Global Protection Summary)

Oracle Enhancements

  • Ability to resize Managed Volumes while still mapping across the underlying cluster resources in a scale-out fashion

Archive Cascading

  • Allows customers to replicate from a Rubrik cluster at Site A to a Rubrik Cluster at Site B with the data then archived from the Site B Rubrik cluster

[image courtesy of Rubrik]

 

Conclusion

I’ve been a fan of Rubrik for some time now. I don’t cover these announcements just because they put me on a #vAllStars baseball card or because they send me swag from time to time. I genuinely think they’re doing some cool stuff and it’s been great to see the evolution of the product over the last few years. Version 4.0 (Alta) was a pretty big release for them (there’s a webinar series you can access on-demand here) and this one adds some new features that a lot of people (particularly enterprise folks) have been asking for.