I’ve done a few posts on Cohesity in the past, and I have some friends who work at Rubrik. So it seemed like a good idea to put up a short article on what Rubrik do. Thanks to Andrew Miller at Rubrik for helping out with the background info.
The Platform
It’s converged hardware and software (called “Briks” – there are different models but 2RU (4 nodes) are the most common).
[image via Rubrik’s website]
The Rubrik solution:
- Is fundamentally built on a scale out architecture;
- Provides a built-in backup application/catalogue with deduplication and compression;
- Uses a custom file system, distributed task scheduler, distributed metadata, etc;
- Delivers cloud native archiving, policy driven at the core around imperative vs. declarative;
- Can leverage cloud native archive (with native hooks into AWS/Azure/etc.);
- Has a custom VSS provider to help with STUN (super VMware friendly),
- Provides a native API since day one (REST-based), and along with vSphere (VADP, CBT, NBDSSL), handles SQL and Linux natively (there’s apparently more to come on that front); and
- There’s an edge appliance for ROBO, amongst other things.
Cloud Data Management
Rubrik position their solution as “Cloud Data Management”.
In a similar fashion to Cohesity, Rubrik are focused on a bunch of stuff, not just backup and recovery or copy data management. There’s a bunch of stuff you can do around archive and compliance, and Rubrik tell me the search capabilities are pretty good too.
It also works well with technologies such as VMware vSAN. Chris Wahl and Cormac Hogan wrote a whitepaper on the integration that you can get here (registration required).
Thoughts
As you can see from this post there’s a lot to look into with Rubrik (and Cohesity for that matter) and I’ve really only barely scratched the surface. The rising popularity of smarter secondary storage solutions such as these points to a desire in the marketplace to get sprawling data under control via policy rather than simple tiers of disk. This is a good thing. Add in the heavy focus on API-based control and I think we’re in for exciting times (or as exciting as this kind of stuff gets in any case). If you’re interested in some of what you can do with Rubrik there’s a playlist on YouTube with some demos that give a reasonable view of what you can do. I’m hoping to dig a little deeper into the Rubrik solution in the next little while, and I’m particularly interested to see what it can do from an archiving perspective, so stay tuned.