Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

backup

Startup intro: SaaS-based backup solution Clumio

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Last week I saw an update from one of the Clumio founders on twitter. It reminded me that I had promised to take a look at their product. This week I had a meeting set up with Clumio and we went over their product and how to configure it briefly. Clumio is a SaaS based backup solution that was founded in 2017 by former PernixData, Nutanix, EMC folks. The three founders are Poojan Kumar, Kaustubh Patil, and Woon Jung, and those three you may remember from PernixData. One thing to point out is that they had 3 rounds of funding (~190 million dollars) so far and they came out of stealth around VMworld 2019. Coincidentally they won the Gold award for Best of VMworld in the data protection category, and best of show for the entire show, not bad for a first VMworld. I guess that I have to point out that although I would classify them as backup/recovery today, they are adding new functionality weekly and “backup/recovery” is probably not a fair category, data protection is more appropriate and it would not surprise me if that evolves to data management and protection over time. If you are not a fan of reading, simply head over to my youtube video on Clumio, otherwise, just continue below.

So how does it work conceptually? Well they basically have a SaaS solution, but you will need to install an OVA (they call it a cloud connector) in your environment to connect to the SaaS platform for VMware on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS. When you connect AWS EBS they use a cloud formation template. This cloud connector is a 4 vCPU/8GB virtual machine that then needs the ability to connect to “the outside world” of course. The Cloud Connector is stateless and requires no updates. You can run this Cloud Connector appliance in multiple clusters, on-prem, or in VMware Cloud on AWS and once they are registered you will see those data sources in your portal.  This is nice as you can see all your data sources across public and private clouds in one single pane of glass. You will have the ability to define “backup schemes” by creating policies. These policies can of course then be associated with objects. These objects can be VMs, Clusters and even vCenter Server instances. This means that if you assign a policy to vCenter Server that every new VM created will inherit the policy automatically. You may wonder, where is your data stored? Your data is stored in S3 buckets that are part of the Clumio SaaS-based platform. Customers are isolated from each other, they will have their own dedicated S3 buckets, and these buckets are created and maintained by Clumio, you as a customer only interact with Clumio! [Read more…] about Startup intro: SaaS-based backup solution Clumio

Rubrik update >> 3.1

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It has been a while since I wrote about Rubrik. This week I was briefed by Chris Wahl on what is coming in their next release, which is called Cloud Data Management 3.1. As Chris mentioned during the briefing, backup solutions grab data. In most cases this data is then never used, or in some cases used for restores but that is it. A bit of a waste if you imagine there are various other uses cases for this data.

First of all, it should be possible from a backup and recovery perspective to set a policy, secure it, validate compliancy and search the data. On top of that the data set should be fully indexed and should be accessible through APIs which allows you to automate and orchestrate various types of workflows, like for instance provide it to developers for test/dev purposes.

Anyway, what was introduced in Cloud Data Management 3.1? Today Rubrik from a source perspective supports vSphere, SQL Server, Linux and NAS and with 3.1 also “physical” Windows (or native, whatever you want to call it) is supported. (Windows 2008 R2, 2012 and 2012 R2) Fully policy based in a similar way to how they implemented it for vSphere. Also, support for SQL Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) was added. Note that the Rubrik connector must be installed on both nodes. Rubrik will automatically recognize that the hosts are part of a cluster and provide additional restore options etc.

There are a couple of User Experience improvements as well. Instead of being “virtual machine” centric now the UI revolves around “hosts”. Meaning that the focus is on the “OS”, and they will for instance show all file systems which are protected and a calendar with snapshots and per day a set of the snapshots of the host. One of the areas Rubrik still had some gaps was reporting and analytics. With 3.1 Rubrik Envision is introduced.

Rubrik Envision provides you build your own fully customisable reports, and of course provides different charts and filtering / query options. These can be viewed, downloaded and emailed in html-5 format. This can also be done in a scheduled fashion, create a report and schedule it to be send out. Four standard reports are included to get you started, of course you can also tweak those if needed.


(blatantly stole this image from Mr Wahl)

Cloud Data Management 3.1 also adds Software Based encryption (AES-256) at rest, where in the past self encrypting devices were used. Great thing is that this will be supported for all R300 series. Single click to enable it, nice! When thinking about this later I asked Chris a question about multi-tenancy and he mentioned something I had not realized:

For multi tenant environments, we’re encrypting data transfers in and out of the appliance using SSL certificates between the clusters (such as hosting provider cluster to customer cluster), which are logically divided by SLA Domains. Customers don’t have any visibility into other replication customers and can supply their own keys for archive encryption (Azure, AWS, Object, etc.)

That was a nice surprise to me. Especially in multi-tenancy environments or large enterprise organizations with clear separation between business units that is a nice plus.

Some “minor” changes Chris mentioned as well, in the past Rubrik would help with every upgrade but this didn’t scale well plus there are customers who have Rubrik gear installed in a “dark site” (meaning no remote connection for security purposes). With the 3.1 release there is the option for customers to do this themselves. Download the binary, upload to the box, type upgrade and things happen. Also, restores directly to ESXi are useful. In the past you needed vCenter in place first. Some other enhancements around restoring, but too many little things to go in to. Overall a good solid update if you ask me.

Last but not least, from a company/business point of view, 250 people work at Rubrik right now. 6x growth in terms of customer acquisition, which is great to hear. (No statement around customer count though.) I am sure we will hear more from the guys in the future. They have a good story, a good product and are solving a real pain point in most datacenters today: backup/recovery and explosion of data sets and data growth. Plenty of opportunities if you ask me.

Virtually Speaking Podcast: Rubrik and Virtual SAN

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As John Nicholson was on a holiday I got to co-host the Virtually Speaking Podcast together with Pete Flecha. As a guest we had Chris Wahl and we spoke about many different things, but the key theme was Rubrik and the paper Chris and Cormac wrote that talks about Rubrik backing up VMs that sit on top of VSAN. I think it was a fun conversation and just wanted to share it with you here. For those who haven’t listened to Virtually Speaking Podcast yet, make sure to subscribe and catch each episode as they are entertaining and educational at the same time if you ask me!

data copy management / converged data management / secondary storage

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At the Italian VMUG I was part of the “Expert panel” at the end of the event. One of the questions was around innovation in the world of IT, what should be next. I knew immediately what I was going to answer: backup/recovery >> data copy management. My key reason for it being is that we haven’t seen much innovation in this space.

And yes before some of my community friends will go nuts and point at Veeam and some of the great stuff they have introduced over the last 10 years, I am talking more broadly here. Many of my customers are still using the same backup solution they used 10-15 years ago, yes it is a different version probably, but all the same concepts apply. Well maybe tapes have been replaced by virtual tape libraries stored on a disk system somewhere, but that is about it. The world of backup/recovery hasn’t evolved really.

Over the last years though we’ve been seeing a shift in the industry. This shift started with companies like Veeam and then continued with companies like Actifio, and this is now accelerated by companies like Cohesity and Rubrik. What is different from what these guys offer versus the more traditional backup solution… well the difference is that all of these are more than backup solutions, they don’t focus on a single use case. They “simply” took a step back and looked at what kind of solutions are using your data today, who is using it, how and of course what for. On top of that, where the data is stored is also a critical part of it of the puzzle.

In my mind Rubrik and Cohesity are leading the pack when it comes to this new wave of, they’ve developed a solution which is a convergence of different products (Backup / Scale-out storage / Analytics / etc). I used “convergence” on purpose, as this is what it is to me “converged data (copy) management”. Although not all use cases may have reached the full potential yet, the vision is pretty clear, and multiple layers have already converged, even if we would just consider backup and scale-out storage. I said pretty clear as the various startups have taken different messaging approaches. This is something that became obvious during the last Storage Field Day where Cohesity presented. Different story than for instance Rubrik had during Virtualization Field Day. Just as an example, Rubrik typical;y leads with data protection and management, where Cohesity’s messaging appears to be more around being a “secondary storage platform”. This in the case of Cohesity lead to discussions (during SFD) around what secondary storage is, how you get data on the platform and finally then what you can do with it.

To me, and the folks at these startups may have completely different ideas around this, there are a couple of use cases which stand out for a converged data management platform, use cases which I would expect to be the first target and I will explain why in a second.

  1. Backup and Recovery (long retention capabilities)
  2. Disaster Recovery using point in time snapshots/replication (relatively short retention capabilities and low RPO)

Why are these the two use cases to go after first? Well it is the easiest way to suck data in to your system and make your system sticky. It is also the market where innovation is needed, on top of that you need to have the data in your system first before you can do anything with it. Before some of the other use cases start to make sense like “data analytics”, or creating clones for “test / dev” purposes, or spinning up DR instances whether that is in your remote site or somewhere in the cloud.

The first use case (backup and recovery) is something which all of them are targeting, the second one not so much at this point. In my opinion a shame, as it could definitely be very compelling for customers to have these two data availability concepts combined. Especially when some form of integration with an orchestration layer can be included (think Site Recovery Manager here) and protection of workloads is enabled through policy. Policy in this case allowing you to specify SLA for data recovery in the form of recovery point, recovery time and retention. And then when needed, you as a customer have the choice of how you want to make your data available again: VM fail-over, VM recovery, live/instant recovery, file granular or application/database object level recovery and so on and so forth. Not just that, from that point on you should be capable of using your data for other use cases, the use cases I mentioned earlier like analytics, test/dev copies etc.

We aren’t there yet, better said we are far from there, but I do feel this is where we are headed towards… and some are closing in faster than others. I can’t wait for all of this to materialize and we start making those next steps and see what kind of new use cases can be made possible on converged data management platforms.

Rubrik 2.0 release announced today

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Today the Rubrik 2.0 release was announced. I’ve written about who they are and what they do twice now so I am not going to repeat that. If you haven’t read those articles please read those first. (Article 1 and article 2) Chris Wahl took the time to brief me and the first thing that stood out to me was the new term that was coined namely: Converged Data Management. Considering what Rubrik does and has planned for the future I think that term is spot on.

When it comes to 2.0 there are a bunch of features that are introduced, I will list them out and then discuss some of them in a bit more detail:

  • New Rubrik appliance model r348
    • Same 2U/4Node platform, but leveraging 8TB disks instead of 4TB disks
  • Replication
  • Auto Protect
  • WAN Efficient (global deduplication)
  • AD Authentication – No need to explain
  • OpenStack Swift support
  • Application aware backups
  • Detailed reporting
  • Capacity planning

Lets start at the top, a new model is introduced next to the two existing models. The 2 other models are also both 2U/4Node solutions but use 4TB drives instead of the 8TB drives the R348 will be using. This will boost capacity for  single Brik up to roughly 300TB, in 2U this is not bad at all I would say.

Of course the hardware isn’t the most exiting, the software changes fortunately are. In the 2.0 release Rubrik introduces replication between sites / appliances and global dedupe which ensures that replication is as efficient as it can be. The great thing here is that you backup data and replicate it straight after it has been deduplicated to other sites. All of this is again policy driven by the way, so you can define when you want to replicate, how often and for how long data needs to be saved on the destination.

Auto-protect is one of those features which you will take for granted fast, but is very valuable. Basically it will allow you to set a default SLA on a vCenter level, or Cluster – Resource Pool – Folder, you get the drift. Set and forget is basically what this means, no longer the risk of newly provisioned VMs which have not been added to the backup schedule. Something really simple, but very useful.

When it comes to applications awareness Rubrik in version 2.0 will also leverage a VSS provider to allow for transactional consistent backups. This applies today for Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint and Active Directory. More can be expected in the near future. Note that this applies to backups, for restoring there is no option (yet) to restore a specific mailbox for instance, but Chris assured me that this on their radar.

When it comes to usability a lot of improvements have been made starting with things like reporting and capacity planning. One of the reports which I found very useful is the SLA Compliancy reporting capability. It will simply show you if VMs are meeting the defined SLA or not. Capacity planning is also very helpful as it will inform you what the growth rate is locally and in the cloud, and also when you will be running out of space. Nice trigger to buy an additional appliance right, or change your retention period or archival policy etc. On top of that things like object deletion, task cancellation, progress bars and much more usability improvements have made it in to the 2.0 release.

All in all an impressive release, especially considering the 1.0 was released less than 6 months ago. It is great to see a high release cadence for an industry which has been moving extremely slow for the past decades. Thanks Rubrik for stirring things up!