Some of you may have seen the article by The Register last week about this new startup called Rubrik. Rubrik just announced what they are working on and announced their funding at the same time:
Rubrik, Inc. today announced that it has received $10 million in Series A funding and launched its Early Access Program for the Rubrik Converged Data Management platform. Rubrik offers live data access for recovery and application development by fusing enterprise data management with web-scale IT, and eliminating backup software. This marks the end of a decade-long innovation drought in backup and recovery, the backbone of IT. Within minutes, businesses can manage the explosion of data across private and public clouds.
The Register made a comment, which I want to briefly touch on. They mentioned it was odd that a venture capitalist is now the CEO for a startup and how it normally is the person with the technical vision who heads up the company. I can’t agree more with The Register. For those who don’t know Rubrik and their CEO, the choice for Bipul Sinha may come as a surprise it may seem a bit odd. Then there are some who may say that it is a logical choice considering they are funded by Lightspeed… Truth of the matter is that Bipul Sinha is the person with the technical vision. I had the pleasure to see his vision evolve from a couple of scribbles on the whiteboard to what Rubrik is right now.
I still recall having a conversation with Bipul talking about the state of the “backup industry”, and I recall we agreed the different components of a datacenter had evolved over time but that the backup industry was still very much stuck in the old world. (We agreed backup and recovery solutions suck in most cases…) Back when we had this discussion there was nothing yet, no team, no name, just a vision. Knowing what is coming in the near future and knowing their vision I do think this quote from the press release embraces best what Rubrik is working on and it will do:
Today we are excited to announce the first act in our product journey. We have built a powerful time machine that delivers live data and seamless scale in a hybrid cloud environment. Businesses can now break the shackles of legacy and modernize their data infrastructure, unleashing significant cost savings and management efficiencies.
Of course Rubrik would not be possible without a very strong team of founding members. Arvind Jain, Arvind Nithrakashyap and Soham Mazumdar are probably the strongest co-founders one can wish. The engineering team has deep experience in building distributed systems, such as Google File System, Google Search, YouTube, Facebook Data Infrastructure, Amazon Infrastructure, and Data Domain File System. Expectations just raised a couple of notches right?!
I agree that even the statement above is still a bit fluffy so lets add some more details, what are they working on? Rubrik is working on a solution which combines backup software and a backup storage appliance in to a single solution and initially will target VMware environments. They are building (and I hate using this word) a hyperconverged backup solution and it will scale from 3 to 1000s of nodes. Note that this solution will be up and running in 15 minutes and includes the option to age out data to the public cloud. What impressed me most is that Rubrik can discover your datacenter without any agents, it scales-out in a fully automated fashion and will be capable of deduplicating / compressing data but also offer the ability to mount data instantly. All of this through a slick UI or you can leverage the REST APIs , fully programmable end-to-end.
I just went over “instant mount” quickly, but I want to point out that this is not just for “restoring VMs”. Considering the REST APIs you can also imagine that this would be a perfect solution to enable test/dev environments or running Tier 2/3 workloads. How valuable is it to have instant copies of your production data available and test your new code against production without any interruption to your current environment? To throw a buzzword in there: perfectly fit for a devops world and continuous development.
That is about all I can say for now unfortunately… For those who agree that backup/recovery has not evolved and are interested in a backup solution for tomorrow, there is an early access program and I urge you to sign up to learn more but also help shaping the product! The solution is targeting environments of 200 VMs and upwards, make sure you meet those requirements. Read more here and/or follow them on twitter (or Bipul).
Good luck Rubrik, I am sure this is going to be a great journey!
Kyle Hailey says
Thanks for the interesting write-up on Rubrik. Look forward to seeing what the can do. Sounds exciting and a great team.
By the way this technology is not new. The first company to provide such a solution is Delphix. For the last 5 years Delphix has supplied a software appliance to provide copies of data in minutes (RTO) down to the second (RPO) for almost no initial storage by using thin cloning technology (aka data virtualization).
Delphix is already used by over 100 of the Fortune 500,
It’s also available for download and try at http://pages.delphix.com/Free-Trial-Request.html
Delphix works with any kind of data, but some types of data are complex such as Oracle RAC databases and Delphix automates all the complexity out complex data. What blows me away is how easy it is handle complex data with Delphix. Here is an example of syncing (backup stream of changes) to a RAC database and provision a running RAC database : http://datavirtualizer.com/cloning-oracle-rac-in-5-minutes/
Duncan Epping says
Would be good to disclaim that you work for Delphix, as that would make it a bit more obvious why it blows you away 🙂
Also, the focus for Delphix seem to be on another layer, but nevertheless a very interesting solution indeed.
Kyle Hailey says
Good point, yes, I definitely work at Delphix.
Delphix has a partnership to provide database backup service for VMware vCloud Air for example.
Backup and recovery is a $47 billion market according to IDC, while application projects are a $1 trillion market and account for 50 percent of global IT spending.
Delphix serves as a backup device, but at it’s core Delphix accelerates application development. Application development acceleration has been the most important functionallity for Delphix customers. Even those customers who originally bought Delphix for storage reduction and backup & recovery have later said the application development acceleration benefits far eclipsed all other benefits. Delphix was built for providing self service interfaces for developers with data versioning (like code versioning), rollback, refresh, bookmark, branching etc.