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Rubrik, a new-gen converged data management provider that boldly aims to replace conventional storage, had a couple of news items to share May 26: It unveiled a new plug-and-play storage appliance that simply seems to be too good to be true, and it announced a $41 million injection of Series B venture capital.
So it’s been a big week for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup. Rubrik, which closed its first $10 million VC round only last March, will use the latest investment—led by Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and existing angel investors—for general business scale-out purposes because demand has been high for its wares.
Rubrik’s software, developed by key engineers who were behind Google, Facebook, VMware and Data Domain, powers the new r300 Series Hybrid Cloud Appliance, which runs on the company’s home-developed Converged Data Management Platform.
Built for Web-scale Workloads
CEO and co-founder Bipul Sinha told eWEEK that the hybrid cloud appliance is the industry’s “first converged data management system built on Web-scale IT. All the previous systems have been around for decades and were not built for big data and Web-type workloads, plain and simple. This is really the first big innovation in backup and recovery in 10 years.”
The r300 is anchored by a Cloud-Scale File System, a distributed system built from scratch that mirrors Google Colossus—the fast file system that makes Google Search possible. Rubrik converges backup software and backup storage into a single data lake using a connecting fabric, much in the same way that Nutanix has simplified the primary IT environment with a single fabric.
It should be no surprise, then, that the co-founder of Nutanix, Dheeraj Pandey, is an angel investor, as are such familiar names such as John Thompson (Microsoft chairman and former Symantec CEO), Mark Leslie (founder of Veritas) and Frank Slootman (former CEO of Data Domain).
What’s Under the Hood
The r300 Series Hybrid Cloud Appliance is a 2U unit containing up to four x86-powered nodes and comes preconfigured with the Rubrik Converged Data Management Platform (RCDM). The Rubrik platform is anchored by the patent-pending Cloud-Scale File System, which is version-enabled with intelligent management of both flash and spinning disks. Rubrik Converged Data Management is designed to scale out to tens of thousands of nodes, Sinha said.
This infrastructure connects to the cloud (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google) and gives users a hybrid cloud infrastructure, Sinha said. “So there is no need to go to the tape anymore. You can move data and files to and from the cloud (or from your onsite storage) without needing to know exactly where your data is,” Sinha said.
All of an enterprise’s data and files are in one large, hardware- and cloud-connected data lake (or ocean, as may be the case) that can be searched backward and forward using metadata, in the style of a time machine. Rubrik connects them all in one big, virtualized file system.
What Users Will Get
Key business benefits of the Rubrik r300 Series Hybrid Cloud Appliance, according to Sinha, include the following:
- Easy setup: Rubrik can be up and running in less than 15 minutes, the company claims.
- Zero-time recovery: Users can instantly recover applications by utilizing Rubrik as a mountable live storage endpoint.
- Public cloud economics: It intelligently delivers long-term data retention by using public cloud storage.
- Google-like search: Instantly locate any data with predictive search results based on data stored across private and public clouds.
- Accelerated app development: Users can rapidly provision data to developers by turning Rubrik into a storage endpoint.
Conventional backup/recovery is “too expensive, too brittle, too complex for the new world of IT,” Sinha said. “With Rubrik, you only need to buy one thing: That one thing runs on commodity hardware and scales on commodity hardware, just like Google, Amazon, Facebook. If you have a small environment, you buy one box, which has four nodes; if you have a very large environment, you can buy hundreds of boxes of four-node clusters. But they still manage a single system.”
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