Rubrik follow up, GA and funding announcement

Two months ago I published an introduction post on Rubrik. Yesterday Rubrik announced that their platform went GA and they announced a funding round (series B) of 41 million dollars led by Greylock. I want to congratulate Rubrik with this new milestone, major achievement and I am sure we will hear much more from them in the months to come. For those who don’t recall, here is what Rubrik is all about:

Rubrik is building 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.

When I published the article some people made comments that you can do the above with various of other solutions and people asked why I was so excited about their solution. Well, first of all because you can do all of that from a single platform and don’t need a backup solution plus a storage solution and have multiple pieces to manage without scale-out capabilities. I like the model, the combination of what is being offered, the fact that is is a single package designed for this purpose and not glued together… But of course there is more, I just couldn’t talk about it yet. I am not gonna go in to an extreme amount of detail as Cormac wrote an excellent piece here and there is this great blog from Chris, who is a user of the product, which explains the value of the solution. (Always nice to see by the way people read your article and share their experience as well in return…)

I do want to touch on a couple of things which I feel sets Rubrik apart. (And there may be others who do this / offer this, but I haven’t been briefed by them.)

Global search across all data
- “Google-alike” search, which means you start typing the name of a file in the UI of any VM and while typing the UI already presents a list of potential files you are looking for. Then when it shows the right file you click it and it presents a list of options. The file with this name could of course be on one or many VMs, you can pick which one you want and select from which point in time. When I was an admin I was often challenged with this problem “I deleted a file, I know the name… but no clue where I stored it, can you recover it?”. Well that is no problem any longer with global search, just type the name and restore it.
True Scale Out
- I’d already highlighted this, but I agree with Scott Lowe that there is “scale-out” and there is “Scale-Out”. In the case of Rubrik we are talking scale out with capital S and capital O. Not just from a capacity stance, but also when it comes to (as Scott points out) task management and the ability to run any task anywhere in the cluster. So with each node you add you aren’t just scaling capacity, but also performance on all fronts. No single choking point with Rubrik as far as I can tell.
Miscellaneous, stuff that people take for granted… but does matter
- API-Driven – Not something you would expect I would get excited about. And it seems such an obvious thing, but Rubrik’s solution can be configured and managed through the API they expose. Note that every single thing you see in the UI can be done through the API, the UI is simply an API client.
- Well performing instant mount through the use of flash and serving the cluster up as a scale-out NFS solution to any vSphere host in your environment. Want to access a VM that was backed-up? Mount it!
- Cloud archiving… Yes others offer this functionality I know. I still feel it is valuable enough to mention that Rubrik does offer the option to archive data to S3 for instance.

Of course there is more to Rubrik then what I just listed, read the articles by Scott, Cormac and Chris to get a good overview… Or just contact Rubrik and ask for a demo.

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!

rubrik