In this release, the Rubrik Cluster is a NAS Target for Oracle RMAN using an agent-less approach. RMAN manages backup and restore activities for the DB and Redo logs. There’s also support for Incremental Merge (an advanced RMAN feature providing the ability to take an initial full backup, subsequent incremental backups, and then on a rolling basis update the full backup with a previously taken incremental).

What?

You get the good stuff like automated protection and restore workflow, including:

• Support for policy driven protection and retention operations;
• VM-granular backup and restore;
• Auto-protection of newly discovered VMs;
• The ability to export and recover VMs; and
• File browse and download

You can also securely replicate or archive to other sites, and you get access to Rubrik’s “Core Capabilities” (global search, erasure coding, reporting, and more). You can also scale as you need. Note, however, that file-level restore and live mount is not currently supported.

How?

1. Create a snapshot on Nutanix. Identify the changed regions between the newly created snapshot and the base snapshot;
2. Rubrik authenticates with the volume group;
3. Data is ingested; and
4. A cleanup of the volume group and base snapshot is run. The snapshot created in step 1 becomes the new base.

What is that?

• You can power-on a snapshot of a VM in the cloud (specifically AWS);
• The instance type recommendation is based on the VM configuration file;
• You get 2-click deployment and end-to-end orchestration; and
• UI integration to launch, power off or de-provision an instance.

• You might want to spin up a cloud “sandbox” for dev / test;
• You can spin up machines as needed (at potentially lower cost);
• Refresh machines with the latest copy of production data;
• You could use this as a form of disaster recovery; or
• As a means to perform a migration of an on-premises VM to the cloud.

1. Create a VMDK (from snapshots in S3 using Rubrik-in-Cloud or on-premises)
2. Upload to S3
3. Create an AMI (using AWS APIs)
4. Launch the EC2 instance from AMI

Note that there is no requirement to have a Rubrik Cloud Cluster running in the target Amazon region.

• Power on read/write clones instantaneously;
• Provision a clone to any desired Point in Time;
• Mount the same database across multiple hosts (e.g. dev/test machines);
• RestAPIs allow the automation of workflows;
• Self service capability using RBAC.

• Ad hoc Restores – you might want to perform granular restores without restoring entire database (e.g. restore table of large database by copying from Live Mounted database);
• Database backup health checks; or
• Dev/Test workloads: Spin up copies of your production database (carefully obfuscating identifying data, no doubt).

Believe it or not, there are still a lot of people who want / need /can’t let go of tape as a backup option. Rubrik have recognised this, and have partnered with QStar to deliver tape out functionality. QStar exposes the tape library as NFS/SMB shares. Note that Rubrik cannot speak directly to tape libraries. There are a number of reasons why they’ve (sensibly) decided to let QStar do the heavy lifting in this scenario:

• Each tape vendor has their own proprietary interface;
• QStar presents a common interface irrespective of the tape vendor; and
• QStar supports the industry standard LTFS format.

You can now provide a custom TLS Certificate signed by a trusted CA (hooray!). It’s a fairly simple process too.

1. Generate the Certificate Signing Request (CSR);
2. Get the CSR signed by a trusted CA; and
3. Provide the signed certificate in the Rubrik UI.